billfold suggested a size about half that of a dollar-bill if you didn’t want it to get creased when you put your wallet in your back pocket and sat on it. The earliest card provided its trust conveyance through its printed body. It provided a token that established the financial integrity of the bearer to the vendor, at least to the extent that local restaurants would let you charge dinner if you had a card. The card worked in a relatively small locale where everyone knew everyone or, at least most everyone that needed to know knew of the card and what it meant.

Of course, where there’s money there are people that want it, without necessarily deserving it. Less obvious than the appearance of the first credit card was the appearance of the first counterfeit credit card. But, it did occur, and thus began the attack and countermeasures cycle of the use of the card. The early cards migrated from a generically printed card to one that had a name and perhaps an account number of some type on it. This initial usage was followed by the desire to employ the card as a means of commerce beyond the local neighborhood. That required greater infrastructure: a citywide, statewide, nation-wide and then worldwide infrastructure. In order to both level the playing field, and make it something of a trustworthy playing field at that, standards had to be established. This is the way of technology.

Lest you think we’re moving rather far a field from our starting point, bear in mind that standardization in the world of computing infrastructures is something of an amalgam of Mecca connected to Jerusalem via the Ganges and protected by the fortress of Machu Picchu. It is a nexus of divine guidance within a world of chaos.

Today, one can, while waiting for a plane at the Austin, Texas airport, pay for lunch with a credit card. Then, boarding the plane, leave the confines of Austin, fly to Hong Kong, walk into a hotel, and pay for a room with the same credit card. That’s something of a tour de force of standardization. This was the goal as the earliest credit cards began their journey through the standards making maze.

First, the size of the card was fixed; then some of the numbers and words; account numbers, not just the numbers, but also their internal structure. Who issued them, who stood behind them and were they accurately represented on the card. Notice that we’re now getting into the realm of conveying information; and, not just any information, but information that we, as the card bearer, really do want the hotel clerk in Hong Kong to believe and accept as payment for our room. So, more and more information content was affixed onto the surface of the card.

The issuer’s logo conveyed an idea of who stood behind the financial transactions involved. In Hong Kong, they don’t know us from Cain and Abel (to lapse back into the whirlpool of the metaphoric build-up of religious expression) but they do seem to understand Visa, MasterCard or American Express. Unfortunately, the people that all this information needed to be conveyed to, the people that really needed to trust it, are the short-order cook at the Austin airport and the night-clerk at the hotel in Hong Kong. Today, a listing of all of the identity-type cards issued by trust authorities in the United States alone comes to about one hundred small-print pages. A listing to include all the passport documents in the world, with details of how to tell that each one is valid, adds two or three hundred more pages. If one is really going to trust a card presented by a stranger, then one needs to be able to apply the rules of authentication for the specific card. This is a very complex transaction to be performed and we’re still just at the point of wanting to understand and believe the information on the face of the card. The world we’ve evolved into in just a half-century is already too complex for the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, let alone the hotel night-clerk to individually apply all the necessary rules; and rest assured, to show understanding, we could just as correctly reverse the order of that comparison.

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