ABSA ATMs are getting a refresh

Suffice to say I think this is fascinating. It sounds to me like the banks are updating 16MHz IBM's with floppy drives and black and white screens. Excuse my ignorance but the likes of Triton and NEC make the physical machine not the software?
 
hambone said:
Suffice to say I think this is fascinating. It sounds to me like the banks are updating 16MHz IBM's with floppy drives and black and white screens. Excuse my ignorance but the likes of Triton and NEC make the physical machine not the software?
Click to expand...

the oldest machine that SBSA had when I left was a p3 with 64MB RAM... We upgraded the ram to 512MB and in one or two cases we replaced the whole case with a dual core.

Hehe on that, wonder where did they get enough IDE drives. They wont be able to recycle many of the drives they remove.
 
hambone said:
Suffice to say I think this is fascinating. It sounds to me like the banks are updating 16MHz IBM's with floppy drives and black and white screens. Excuse my ignorance but the likes of Triton and NEC make the physical machine not the software?
Click to expand...
Yip. The current ATM software of Std Bank is a VB6 piece of code. It took me a week+ to get it running on the emulator on my computer to actually develop on it.

The computer inside can be anything from a laptop to a Dell/ HP/Whatever branch PC.
 
hambone said:
Suffice to say I think this is fascinating. It sounds to me like the banks are updating 16MHz IBM's with floppy drives and black and white screens. Excuse my ignorance but the likes of Triton and NEC make the physical machine not the software?
Click to expand...

As for the question about NEC and Triton, if im not mistaken they do both. I worked for Diebold and what normally happens it that the supplier of the machine has a off the shelf solution and a software stack that the sell if the client wants to develop their own software.
 
jouda said:
the oldest machine that SBSA had when I left was a p3 with 64MB RAM... We upgraded the ram to 512MB and in one or two cases we replaced the whole case with a dual core.
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Sound familiar. When did you leave the bank?
 
I'm reading about a recent judgement in the US that determined that all ATM's should be accessible to people with disabilities, in terms of communication and accessibility of the software and the machine itself. This would mean that the software needed to be updated to take all this into consideration (specifically something about voice guidance?). The judge gave them 6 months to roll out the fixes.

They must be in a world of trouble then to achieve this deadline if the process is as laborious as you folk say (and I have no reason to doubt you).
 
hambone said:
Suffice to say I think this is fascinating. It sounds to me like the banks are updating 16MHz IBM's with floppy drives and black and white screens. Excuse my ignorance but the likes of Triton and NEC make the physical machine not the software?
Click to expand...

Triton make their own software, its a thin client.

Interesting to see how many people here also work on ATM software, we should start our own group. ;P

(Blue Bank in particular)
 
MielieSpoor said:
Nope it never did. So you left with the restructure of GroupIT?
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Just before that.

hambone said:
I'm reading about a recent judgement in the US that determined that all ATM's should be accessible to people with disabilities, in terms of communication and accessibility of the software and the machine itself. This would mean that the software needed to be updated to take all this into consideration (specifically something about voice guidance?). The judge gave them 6 months to roll out the fixes.

They must be in a world of trouble then to achieve this deadline if the process is as laborious as you folk say (and I have no reason to doubt you).
Click to expand...

Well that would ten to one not be an entire system change, just changes to the existing software. These changes are normally pushed to the machines using Tivoli or Altris or something similar.

We spent quite some time on this, but what they fail to get is that an ATM will bot be easily accessible to a person in a wheelchair due to the height that it is installed at. The earphone jack for the voice guidance was an optional on the ATMs many banks did not get it.
 
Nerfherder said:
Triton make their own software, its a thin client.

Interesting to see how many people here also work on ATM software, we should start our own group. ;P

(Blue Bank in particular)
Click to expand...

Hehe, I miss it to be quite honest. But alas Priora had many casualties.

EDIT: come to think about it, you are right. The Triton machines were upgraded by changing proms, if memory serves me correct. No custom SW there.
 
hambone said:
I'm reading about a recent judgement in the US that determined that all ATM's should be accessible to people with disabilities, in terms of communication and accessibility of the software and the machine itself. This would mean that the software needed to be updated to take all this into consideration (specifically something about voice guidance?). The judge gave them 6 months to roll out the fixes.

They must be in a world of trouble then to achieve this deadline if the process is as laborious as you folk say (and I have no reason to doubt you).
Click to expand...

I had to do something like that... its very hard to put out good code when the changes/timelines are dictated by government legislation.

So many different factors to consider when making changes, sometimes "fast" and "looks cool" are put aside for "works" and "are allowed to do that"
 
Nerfherder said:
I had to do something like that... its very hard to put out good code when the changes/timelines are dictated by government legislation.

So many different factors to consider when making changes, sometimes "fast" and "looks cool" are put aside for "works" and "are allowed to do that"
Click to expand...

crapload of Middleware = nightmare. Making that fast and look good on top of that is scary.
 
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Give something back?

Instead of the client's giving something back. How about ABSA donating a percentage of the bank charges to the charities of our choice?
Bank charge for this and for that. To deposit and to withdraw funds and an 'admin fee' per account. :mad::mad::mad::mad::
 
This 6000 x ATM software refresh is not taking 3 years - it's being done by several hundred field engineers. It started in early October and will end before Christmas 2011. There is a larger 3-year program to deliver additional capability through ATMs. This has been publically announced.

If I were doing it I wouldn't do so by HDD replacement or loading from an external HDD. For bandwidth reasons it doesn't make sense to push it out over the internal ABSA ATM network. If I were ABSA management I'd insist - for security reasons - that writable media cannot be used in any way whatsoever. The best way, all things considered: Create master images created in a highly secure environment; write and replicate them to read-only optical media in an encrypted form, and then deploy to the ATMs by field engineers, totally overwriting the original disk. Make sure there is absolutely minimal user interaction by the field engineer when deploying the image. Also, incorporate various security checks to ensure the image (and only the image) is written to disk, and no other software is introduced into the system. The security checks shold be as tight as technology and human controls can make it.

There is a wide range of machines.
 
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I just want to say that I know of people who have been fired for revealing that kind of info on public forums.

PS: Its a pretty standard way of deploying images BTW
 
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