Re: big, fast, etc, was is Vax addressing sane today

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

Ten years ago Visa could process 56,000 messages/second. It must be a
lot more now. I think a transaction is two or four messages depending
on the transaction type.

card associations were originally to promote brand
acceptance/uptake/advertising and network interconnecting the
acquiring/merchant card transaction processors with the issuing/consumer
card transaction processors (issuer processor doing the real-time
authorization/"auth" transaction).

late 90s, internet/micropayments was looking at card transaction
processors being able to handle micropayments ... but required
singnificantly higher transaction rate than card processors were capable
off. They turn to cellphone operations that were using "in-memory" DBMS
capable of ten times the transaction rate (that card processors were
doing).

Some of the cellphone companies were enticed to get into micropayments
but got out after a few years, turns out they lacked the significant
fraud handling capability (they were absorbing cellphone calling fraud
because it was their own resources, but in case of micropayments fraud,
it involved actually transferring real money to other entities).

As an side, card association interconnect network was flavor of VAN
(value added networks) that was prevalent at the time, but were in the
process of of being obsoleted by the internet. As an side, at the turn
of the century, 90% of all acquiring&issuing card transactions were
being handled by six datacenters having their own private, dedicated,
non-association interconnect ... big litigation between card
associations and those processors (the card association network had been
charging fee for each transaction that flowed through their network, and
association still wanted that fee paid them whether or not the
transaction actually flowed their network.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970