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The
iButton's single largest installation is AKBIL, the City
of Istanbul's small change purse. Prior to 1994, five
million Turkish mass transit riders daily purchased 45
different kinds of tickets, tokens, passes and cards to
board some part of a public transport system, world-class
in its diversity. City planners needed an electronic
system for handling point-of-sale, micro-cash exchange.
The engineers wanted a technology they could program and
set up themselves, to their own specifications, but that
would also be efficiently implemented, easy-to-use, and
economical or cost-free to maintain.
Dallas Semiconductor's
iButton delivered it all. Turkish engineers programmed
the iButton chip to handle the micro-cash transactions
for transit passes and developed iButton refill stations
and pass readers. When AKBIL went into operation, 1.4
million riders added plastic key fobs to their key rings,
each studded with an iButton, and headed for the
turnstiles. Since the iButton itself is practically
indestructible and infallibly touch-connects to its
reader over many years, the city does not have to keep
reinvesting in hardware.
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