# ATMs Face Deadline to Upgrade From Windows XP



## ekim68 (Jul 8, 2003)

> Inside every ATM casing is a computer, and like all such devices, each one runs on an OS. Microsofts 12-year-old Windows XP dominates the ATM market, powering more than *95 percent of the worlds machines and a similar percentage in the U.S.*, according to Robert Johnston, a marketing director at NCR (NCR), the largest ATM supplier in the U.S.


Here


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

It's not like they are connected to MS update and get updates every month. The software will not suddenly stop working. Banks will still be able to update the software that runs on top of XP. They run a very much cut down version of XP that is heavily customised.


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## Triple6 (Dec 26, 2002)

Journalism is a dead profession these days. 

And Windows XP Embedded support runs until 2017 anyways. Plus ATMs don't just sit on the public internet for anyway to just come across or for malware to infect, they use very secure connections back to the banks. The title makes it seem like the machines must be replaced or they'll suddenly be hacked or stop working, in fact they may never get updates nor need them and will be no more vulnerable then they are today.


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## ekim68 (Jul 8, 2003)

I agree that the title is misleading, but what caught my eye was the fact that 95% of the ATM's were using XP. I've used many ATM's and never thought about what kind of software they used. It seemed to me that what they were doing was very basic and only needed a few lines of code, well maybe more than a few, to perform their service..


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Barclays' ATMs don't use XP (at least in the UK).
I was contracting at Barclays and they needed some changes to the ATM code. The code is written in Assembler and I happened to be the only person there who had even seen Assembler and that was only from sorting Cobol and PL/1 dumps. 
So I got the job. It actually turned out to be fortuitous as, in order to make what was a simple change, I had to delve quite deeply into the code. What I discovered was that the code did not reflect the documentation that they were working from. I realise that it never does, but, in this case, it was taken from a completely different book. My contract was extended at very nice rates for a further year.


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