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At the time, the business was beset by bad debts and fraud, and the cards themselves were primitive: They lacked the magnetic stripes that would later encode customer information; transactions that required bank authorizations took a long time; and the embossed information on them — customer name, card number, expiration date — was awkwardly copied onto receipts with a heavy imprinter.

Many of the machines in the small factory, like the logo stamper, with its rust-flecked metal and old-style rubber imprinter, look more like museum pieces than cogs in a modern assembly line.

She ran credit sales by putting a triplicate sales slip into a flatbed credit card imprinter and running the slider back and forth.

Keychain braille imprinter for marking cash, from “Designing for the Blind.”