Depends where your boundaries are. I like to think of "last century" as being anything before 1954. :-) Even in 1980 the good folk who designed these systems can't have been so stupid as to think D&C would be secure enough for keeping money safe.
Well, yes, that's exactly what I mean.
I meant that random info together with account details went into the oven when they were baking the PIN pie. Then they slice off 4 digits and give them to the customer, and put the other few dozen onto the magstrip.
Of course it's readable, but it's unintelligible.
I'd have thought that what they'd have done is, as I said before, is set up a system such that the N-4 digit security info stored on the stripe, together with the 4 digit keyed PIN (perhaps modified by a card-stored offset separate from the N-4) would be fed into either a secret algorithm stored in the ATM, or into a not-so-secret algorithm together with a top-secret additional key stored in the ATM (the same in all ATMs), and this algorithm would then map those inputs to a simple yes or no.
What was there, AFAYR?