History (1988): 1Mb on Magnetic Credit Card from Kodak-Pathé

Kodak-Pathé (Paris, France), Eastman Kodak’s French subsidiary, announced a new magnetic card, the size of a credit card, with a 1Mb capacity.

One side of the card is entirely covered with a protected magnetic coating. It includes exactly 150 1Kb tracks (128 usable).

This new card has been entirely developed in Kodak-Pathé’s laboratory in Chalon-sur-Saône, as well as the R/W device that was shown working at the European show Imagerie Electronique that took place in Paris on October 19 to 21.

It takes 500ms to read one track and 8s for the whole card.

There could be further applications, according to Kodak-Pathé’s spokesmen: access cards with recorded entrances, medical cards, car rental cards, cards for every car with its repairs.

End user prices are FF5,000 for the card recorder and FF40 for the card with an order of 500 to 1,000.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠9, volume ≠1, published on October 1988.