A Brief History of Smart Cards

Today, smart cards are used extensively in our everyday lives — including as one option for Tensor's security and access control systems. The enhanced security, convenience, durability and flexibility of smart cards — not to mention the varied and wide-ranging technology with which they integrate— has ensured they have become an important part of 21^st Century living.  

Today, smart cards are used extensively in our everyday lives — including as one option for Tensor's security and access control systems. The enhanced security, convenience, durability and flexibility of smart cards — not to mention the varied and wide-ranging technology with which they integrate— has ensured they have become an important part of 21^st Century living.  

But smart cards have been around for over 50 years — and the idea of integrating a computer chip onto a small device has been around for longer, with engineers and inventors from Germany, Japan and the USA independently developing similar 'circuit on a card' ideas in the early 1970s. 

Ultimately, the first 'smart card' type of device was created by French inventor Roland Moreno in 1974 as a portable memory device to enable financial transactions. Consequently, the early adopters of smart card technology were French, in particular the bank Carte Bleue. 

The first actual card-style smart card was produced in the late 1970s by Motorola and Bull, which had two chips, a microcontroller and a memory chip, allowing data on them to be modified. French banks quickly took up the smart card as a more secure method of conducting transactions, and in the early 1980s the technology became more widespread throughout Europe.  

By the late '80s Bull began to licence the technology for purposes other than banking, including telecommunications, pay-TV and access control, while France fully implemented the technology as a banking solution in 1993 with all banking cards issued that year including a chip. European mobile telephones had now also started to use smart cards as a form of identification via the Global System of Communication (GSM). 

The early 1990s saw the USA begin to implement smart cards, however at a slower rate than Europe. The American market received a significant boost in 1996, when over half a million commemorative smart cards were issued at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The growth of smart card use in America continued unabated throughout the end of the 20^th Century — and enthusiasm for the devices even prompted an MIT-authored paper in 1997 imagining how smart cards would be used in the not-too-distant future of 2010. 

The '90s also saw the introduction of smart cards for transport, with the Korean Upass being integrated into transport systems in 1996, while in the UK individual county councils used a smart card system initially for concessionary travellers; the Oyster card scheme in London was introduced eight years after the Upass, in 2003.  

Amongst this boom in smart card usage, in 1991 Tensor released the world's first smart card based time and attendance system — and you can read more about the history of time and attendance in our blog here. 

In the wider world throughout the '90s, Finland issued the first national electronic ID card in 1999, contactless smart cards provided a boost in convenience, and the EMV standard was established in 1998 for banking cards, which guaranteed that the cards would be usable around the world (the name was an acronym of the three largest payment processing companies of the time, Europay, Mastercard and Visa). 

Throughout the early 21^st Century, smart cards and the technological advances they have led to have become so ubiquitous that it's impossible to imagine life without them — contactless payments, ID cards, mobile phones, transport, gaming, healthcare — and, of course, security and timekeeping. 

Tensor's smart cards have evolved significantly since their world-leading introduction in 1991, but the essential benefits are the same: convenient and easy to store, hard-wearing and weather resistant, highly secure, and extremely customisable.