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by vbezhenar 2909 days ago
Every ATM I ever saw uses Windows.
3 comments

They used to use OS/2, but then Windows came along and we've been living in a world filled with misery ever since.

On no planet does using a consumer version of Windows in these things make sense.

Good thing it's not typically a consumer version! If you watch one reboot (or other applications like store POS systems) you can see that it is Windows XP embedded, or nowadays sometimes Windows 7 embedded, which is decidedly NOT a "consumer" oriented OS
It really depends on the vendor. Big names are at least careful enough to do that. The bottom of the barrel white-label vendors often don't care. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some of those Windows installations are using pirated keys.

It's perpetually concerning how bad the state of systems like this is. A grocery store near me recently deployed a brand new set of self check-out counters...running Windows XP.

Amusingly the credit card/debit card reader is running Linux and shows the old-school penguin image on boot.

I enjoyed seeing Tux on the boot screen of a seat-back in-flight entertainment system recently. And was also amused to see startup sequences for things like MySQL and postfix scroll by.
I don't. That usually means it crashed!
This was during pre-flight when normally all they play anyway is ads that you can't turn off.
I remember when ATMs ran basically plain text terminal software and you had to drive to a bank to get one. It was a real blessing when ATMs started to show up in shopping malls.
I've also seen ATMs displaying Internet Explorer scripting errors, and uninitialized Microsoft FrontPage Components
One of the largest Brazilian banks uses Linux for all of its ATMs (used to be OS/2). It also uses Linux for the bank branch desktops.
The one I use most often runs Windows 7. I can tell because the taskbar is always visible over the application.