Inventor Of ATMs PIN Code Is Honored In Glasgow

James Goodfellow

For that accomplishment, he is one of four engineers who has been inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame. The hall of fame was launched in 2011 by the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland.

"My task was to design the means of allowing a customer, and only a genuine customer, to actuate the dispenser mechanism," Goodfellow recalled. "Areas researched included fingerprints, voice recognition, retinal patterns, card intrinsic value equal to value of money issued, magnetic strip, online operation, embedded resistive network on the card, etc. These approaches all foundered ... Eventually I designed a system which accepted a machine readable encrypted card, to which I added a numerical keypad into which an obscurely related Personal Identification Number had to be entered manually, by the customer."