No one wants to roam around with the cash in the pockets specially when the amount is large. That amount increases the weights in the pockets and also the risk of being stolen increases. Also, if you require huge amount immediately and if the banks are closed during that period of time say in nights, than what would you do?
So, we have a solution to this problem that is we can carry a special type of plastic card which is also known as plastic money. This plastic money is your credit cards and the debit cards. This cards help you to pay or withdraw the cash at any point of time for AUTOMATED TELLER MACHINE’s (ATM’s ).
Now in this article we will learn how this plastic money or ATM cards work.
The ATM card has a black stripe behind the card which comes into function when we swipe the cards. That black stripe has all work to do in an ATM cards. It carries various information about the owner’s account, his/her card number, name and card expiration date in an encoded form.
The Black stripe works on the interaction of the magnetic field, is made up of magnetic materials, so the black stripe is also known as Magnetic Stripe.
This magnetic stripe is made up of tiny iron-based magnetic material which gets permanently magnetized (because it is a ferromagnetic material) when placed in the magnetic field.
Hence, this property of ferromagnetic material to permanently magnetize when placed in magnetic field is very helpful in storing data. And also the by giving opposite magnetic field, it demagnetizes, so once again it fresh to use.
Data in the magnetic stripe is divided into three parts, one and the second part stores the name, card number, expiration date and country code of the owner. The last track stores the additional data like PIN, Currency units and other read/write stuffs.
Thus, this makes the work simple and we spare ourselves from caring the notes of currency.