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Nostalgia cash

A Barclaycash slip - lug holes either end of blue strip
On a university tour with one of my daughters the other day, after an hour of trying (and often failing) to make out what a 'student ambassador' with an impossibly thick accent was saying, I stopped at a cash machine and was overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia.

The thing is, I first used a cash machine when I was at university. But, children, we are not talking cash machines as you know them today. There was no plastic card involved. This was Barclaycash, a cross between an ATM and a chequebook.

You put the slip in drawer 1, entered
your pin and opened drawer 2
Customers were issued with a book of little slips and a PIN. The slips were for fixed amounts of money and had to be located on little lugs before the machine ate them and spat out the cash. Or, rather, you opened a drawer and there was cash waiting. (I had forgotten until seeing the example above that you signed the slip, just like a cheque.)

Ah, how jealous friends who were with different banks marvelled at the advanced technology. We were practically living the 21st century life. Any day soon we'd have jet packs...

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