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VeriFone ZON Credit Card Terminal - Z80 based

F

fibrewire

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Joined
Jan 15, 2011
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24
I'm looking for the original 1983 Zon terminal. It looked like a generic large format desktop printing calculator with a horizontal card swipe track across the top. It could send emails for fast user verification of credit card authorization.

There is a picture here - http://momentum.verifone.com/archive.html - Click the "Product Timeline" tab, and its the first pic top right.

Anyone know where I might get one?
 
I assume you're looking for collecting sake, not just the same functionality in something else? (Just curious what the collecting motivation was).
 
Can't help you with the ZON (I'll keep an eye peeled for one), but the subject of repurposing old credit card terminals has me wondering. I'm sitting here with a TRANZ 380 terminal--it's useless as banks have changed their security radically and no longer use these. But the thing has a nice VFD display, 16-key keypad, card swipe detector and Z80-family internals, not to mention a modem and serial printer and register interfaces.

Should be useful for something...
 
How recent were these changes? I think there are a ton of TRANZ 330s in use out there still, don't know how different the insides are.
 
Well, it could be regional--our supplier demanded a new ($700) terminal, more stringent security and higher annual fees. They weren't interested in getting the old terminal back.

The TRANZ 380 (about 1999) has a Z180 MPU, Z80 PIO, CTC, SIO as well as a TDK single-chip modem, 128KB of SRAM (with space for another 128K) an OKI M6242B RTC with lithium battery, a switch-mode TO-220 voltage regulator as well as the mandatory EPROM and of course, the keyboard, VFD display and swipe reader.

It seems to me that these would be fairly easy to put to some use.
 
Barring addressing issues that might prevent me from getting RAM in low memory space, I'm sure that I could. I haven't looked at the size of the EPROM yet.
 
Collecting purposes only. It might be cool to emulate the server it once connected to...I imagine they would be pretty hard to come by.

My collecting motivation is 8-bit Atari stuff during the early "beige" period and other equipment that might have been in use if I were Richie Rich in the early eighties. However I did manage to score an Atari 815! Well, a friend loaned it to me for a year :D
 
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