The IBM 3624 was released in 1978 as a second-generation automatic teller machine (ATM), a successor to the IBM 3614. Designed at the IBM

Los Gatos Los Gatos (, ; ) is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 census. It is located in the San Francisco Bay Area just southwest of San Jose in the foothills of th ...

lab, the IBM 3624, along with the later IBM 4732 model, was manufactured at IBM facilities in

Charlotte Charlotte ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 census, making Charlotte the 16th-most populo ...

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...

and

Havant Havant ( ) is a town in the south-east corner of Hampshire, England between Portsmouth and Chichester. Its borough (population: 125,000) comprises the town (45,826) and its suburbs including the resort of Hayling Island as well as Rowland's Cast ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

until all operations were sold to

Diebold Diebold Nixdorf is an American multinational financial and retail technology company that specializes in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems (such as ATMs and currency processing systems), point ...

, tied to the formation of the InterBold partnership between IBM and Diebold. Comparable ATM units marketed by other companies at the time were the

TABS 9000 and NCR 5xxx.

Versions and features

The 3624 was marketed in eight different versions. The 3624 Version 8 incorporated use of a six-row by forty-column dot-matrix customer display, four line by 34 character statement / journal printer, labeled function / account keys, one to two currency cartridges and an optional depository. Earlier models, such as the Version 2, featured a smaller two-line display. Unusual by today's standards, the customer's

ATM card An ATM card is a payment card or dedicated payment card issued by a financial institution (i.e. a bank) which enables a customer to access their financial accounts via its and others' automated teller machines (ATMs) and to make approved point of ...

was inserted with the magnetic stripe up. Modern ATMs typically are built to expect customers to insert their card with the magnetic strip facing down (with the added benefit of the card issuer's logo being displayed to the customer on insert), although this can be changed to the opposite orientation. The transaction records printed by the 3624 and used by customers to verify their transactions were approximately 3 inches square and on similar card stock to punch cards. When performing deposits, customers were instructed to place a special transaction record inside of the deposit envelope to aid in the processing of the transaction by the back-office staff. An unfortunate design characteristic of the 3624 was that the

vault Vault may refer to: * Jumping, the act of propelling oneself upwards Architecture * Vault (architecture), an arched form above an enclosed space * Bank vault, a reinforced room or compartment where valuables are stored * Burial vault (enclosure ...

that contained the cash dispenser was located in the upper area of the unit, making it top-heavy. This made the 3624 an extremely awkward machine to transport up and down stairs. Another complaint against the 3624 was the relatively small size of the cash cartridges (used to give money to customers) in comparison to other vendors' equipment at the time. As was typical for ATM hardware of this era, the IBM 3624 had a two distinct high-level communications protocols. The first, a direct mainframe attachment through SDLC links was an IBM SNA LU0 protocol. The second was an attachment to the IBM 3600 and 4700 series of banking equipment, and was a start stop TDM loop with time slots assigned to specific 36xx series equipment at 1200 bit/sec. The IBM 3612, 3624 and 3600 communications protocols were incompatible with other ATM vendor's high-level communications protocols. IBM 3614 (I19760708)

The 3624 was eventually replaced by the IBM 473x series of ATMs which were unsuccessful. Part of the reason for the failure of the IBM 473x to take hold in the ATM marketplace was the lack of a

backward compatibility Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especiall ...

to the 3624 protocol when it was introduced. One of the most lasting features introduced with the 3624 was the IBM 3624 PIN block format used in transmission of an encrypted personal identification number (PIN). The PIN functions, with an early commercial encryption using the DES algorithm, were implemented in two modules - BQKPERS and BQKCIPH - and their export controlled under the US export munitions rules.

References

{{Reflist

External links

A brief mention of the 3624 protocol
from IBM Automated teller machines Diebold 3624