collection and transport of coins from a huge number of pay phones, fraud in the form of theft from the machines and fraud in the form of theft of service by using counterfeit coins. The object of the phone card exercise then was to provide a mechanism to support pay-per-use wireline telephony services at a lower cost than could be accomplished with actual currency.

Now, phone cards always present an infrastructure problem when it comes to their deployment. While their typical physical shape is that of a credit card, their electrical and logical connectivity presents in a very unique form. This was certainly the case at the time of the France Telecom deployment; there were essentially no electrical or logical standards in place to guide the design, production and operation of phone card equipment. In fact, when France Telecom started their considerations for the use of phone card, there weren’t even any serious phone card companies in business. To that time, development work had been done by small groups of individuals, or small groups essentially performing applied research within larger, established companies. France Telecom essentially needed to bring a technology, and its supporting industry, into being. To accomplish this, they turned to a worldwide icon of French industry at the time, Schlumberger, then referred to as the IBM of the oil patch; the oil-patch would probably have better understood in these days the reference to IBM as the Schlumberger of the computer world.

Schlumberger was enlisted to bring the fledgling technology of phone cards into commercial reality. This meant, among other things, the development of manufacturing capabilities allowing the production of phone cards in sufficient quantities with sufficient quality and at a low enough cost to enable a nationwide pay telephone network. This situation is a bit unusual among business entities, although it is not that strange in a government to industry relationship; France Telecom, in this case, being a state institution. The situation: well, it could be considered one of a big customer requiring the availability of a product in short (as in, non-existent) supply. This is a situation that forms a positive feedback loop within a market; demand significantly outpaces supply and a customer that is not cost limited by normal market pressures. Recognizing this, France Telecom did what most governments do in a similar situation; they instituted artificial market pressures to augment the normal marketplace. In this case, France Telecom required Schlumberger to support the establishment of a competitor in order to guarantee a second source for phone card technology. Thus, once the technology was in place, Gemplus was founded as the dominant competitor to Schlumberger in the phone card marketplace.

To this time, phone card development consisted largely of companies or individuals identifying characteristics that were well developed in the computer world in general and adapting the concepts for use with phone cards under the recognition that that they were an emergent species from the typical computer of the day. Schlumberger acquired licensing rights for a number of basic patents from the two principal companies that held the salient patents, Groupe Bull and Innovatron, the company established by Roland Moreno to license the patent portfolio that he established during the early 1970’s. The end result was that a marketplace for a new technology was brought into being by the force of will of a large entity with deep pockets, and a commercial need for which the phone card was a reasonable, although not unique, match. This is about as close as one gets to a technical rendition of the Big Bang in which a whole new ecosystem, with its own set of physical laws, is brought into being through a single impulse. So, the process managed quite nicely to solve the general infrastructure problem that is a mandatory step in the establishment of phone card systems. But, did it handle the other problem specific to the pay-telephone application for which it was developed?

Well, in fact it did. From a technical standpoint, the phone card certainly filled the bill. It was intuitive to use and it provided adequate security of keep attackers from using the general phone

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