5 ms·
Square is a better name. Strip would have been the best name.
by andirk 3y ago
Square is a better name. Strip would have been the best name.
- evaneykelen 3y agoWhile square sounds cool, it also means old-fashioned. Strip seems not a good choice either (seedy or "strip off your money"). Stripe was a good choice.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoNot sure if it predates Stripe, but there's another payments company called Square. They do the little square (get it?) credit card readers that people plug into their phones' headphones jack if they have, like, a booth at the farmer's market or whatever. I'm actually not sure how those work now that 3.5mm jacks are critically endangered. Probably in the USB/Lightning port instead?
- michelb 3y agoHaven’t they been made obsolete a decade ago by ‘tap to pay’ or chip-card systems? I know in The Netherlands I haven't seen a magnetic stripe payment system since 2012.
- dharmab 3y agoIn the US, it's common enough to encounter swipe-only POS systems that you still have to carry your physical cards.
- sgerenser 3y agoSwipe only is very rare in my neck of the woods (only one I can remember is someone at a craft fair in the past year who still only had the original square stripe reader). Perhaps you’re thinking of places that don’t support tap to pay but only chip (and thus don’t support Apple Pay)? Those I run into all the time (looking at you, Lowes and Home Depot).
- nytesky 3y agoI had a plumber show up with a metal slide and CARBON paper. The vintage swipe. Many of my cards no longer have embossed numbers, so that has to be dicey. They take checks too of course
- SoftTalker 3y agoNot sure of the last swipe-only reader I used, but it's still there as a fallback on many of them if chip and/or tap doesn't work for some reason. Gas pumps were the last holdouts on swipe reads, in my area anyway. My son was recently telling me he still knows of people who use the original Square swipe reader on their phone, which surprised me as I had guessed Square no longer supported it, and many phones don't even have the 3.5mm headphone jack that the reader plugs into.
- bragr 3y agoThe US adopted chip card systems much later. You can still find magnetic readers in use, although they are officially deprecated and I've read merchants that haven't upgraded have higher fees and less protection against charge backs.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoBluetooth https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7948-identify-your-square-reader https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7948-identify-your-s...
- cyode 3y agoThe name Square is extra genius because it also means “all debts settled”, like “After this final payment the two of us will be square.”
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoThis usage is derived from code language used by Freemasons, because of their strong association with the carpenter's square device. It has basically entered the common vernacular at this point, but in combination with other symbology, it may signal that you are seeing a conversation between Freemasons. https://www.masonic-lodge-of-education.com/square-and-compasses.html https://www.masonic-lodge-of-education.com/square-and-compas...
- 998244353 3y agoI wonder why they chose 3.5mm in the first place instead of making an USB thingy. Just because it used to be more universal compared to like 5 different standards for the charging/data port? There are some theories online but no definitive answer as far as I can tell.
- beowulfey 3y agoUSB wouldn’t have worked with iPhones, so they would have needed separate hardware for android and iPhone. I’m amazed they were able to do anything with the 3.5mm port though, it seems like some clever engineering
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThe microphone part of the jack provides a small amount of power to serve as a microphone bias. This can be used to power a few small analog electronics as needed. The mag stripe reader may not have needed anything but a reader coil, though, and the phone can probably decode the "sound" that comes from swiping the magnetic stripe.
- wanderingstan 3y agoThe 3.5 jack device required no digital hardware. It was literally just a magnetic read head wired directly to the jack. This generated voltage just like a microphone. The phone app would then “listen” for the cards data. Incredibly clever and dirt cheap hack for making a phone into a portable payments device.
- toast0 3y agoUniversal has got to be it. Afaik, you couldn't plug something into a iPhone charge port and use it with an app; you probably still can't?. Doing it on Android would be a nightmare. Other platforms (which wasn't out of the question at the time), who knows. But every platform will let you use a plugged in mic, and likely detect that one is plugged in. And if the bias voltage for the microphone isn't enough, you can play a sine wave to the headphone contacts (or one of them) to deliver power.
- icegreentea2 3y agoSquare has diversified. Within the POS category, their current 'little square reader' connects using BLE (and reads chip, tap, and phone payment). They also sell more built up POS systems, up to and including full terminals.
- anonymous_sorry 3y agoI would expect strip.com to be NSFW