Re: The knob......
I remember an early passenger operated ticket machine at Manchester Piccadilly station in the mid-80s. Whilst bored and waiting for my parents to pick us up we started playing with this thing. It had a little CRT in the middle of a sloped table absolutely covered with buttons, and a card slot. I put in a debit card and the screen welcomed me with my name and some instructions! Incredible, I thought, so we both then started putting every mag-stripe card we had into the reader. Half of them came up as unreadable, but the others had name data on them; and the ones that had name data included the most surprising of cards! Video store memberships, supermarket loyalty cards, library cards... things that you thought would have had proprietary data formats.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
