The Nordic Terminal Project
The image documents a Swedish savings-bank (Sparbanken) teller position from the early-to-mid 1970s. The teller is recording a cash withdrawal by hand on a voucher while an open passbook (motbok) rests on the desk.
Three pieces of equipment define the installation: the angled electronic teller terminal with its numeric and function keypad at the right; the recessed printing unit in the centre of the desk; and the long, light-wood cabinetry of pigeonhole compartments behind, used to sort the vouchers, forms and account documents that each transaction generated. A rubber stamp and ink pad sit at the lower left for endorsing documents.
The central machine is the Datasaab passbook printer 5808, and the whole desk is part of the Nordic Terminal Project (NTP) — the system Datasaab delivered, with Facit as partner, to the Nordic savings banks after winning the Spadab contract at the end of the 1960s.
The Nordic Terminal Project (NTP)
In the autumn of 1968 the Nordic savings-bank consortium — initially Sweden, Denmark and Finland, with Norway joining later — issued a tender to some 21 suppliers for a common bank-terminal specification. The work was coordinated through the savings banks' joint data organisation, known in Sweden as Spadab (Sparbankernas Datacentraler), with counterparts SDC (Sparekassernes Datacentral) in Denmark and SCAB (Sparbankernas Centralaktiebank) in Finland.
The contract was signed in Copenhagen and announced on 26 September 1969. Datasaab won it in competition with roughly fifteen other suppliers, in partnership with Facit — Datasaab as systems supplier, Facit supplying equipment for the cash workstations.
The first stage covered an order on the order of 50 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to roughly 2,500 terminals. Pilot installations began in April 1972, with serial deliveries that autumn; by the end of 1973 orders had grown to around 6,000 terminals and some 2,300 D5/20 minicomputers, making it one of the largest bank-terminal systems in the world at the time.
The terminal could run offline or online. Offline, transactions were captured locally onto cassette tape and sent to the data-processing centre; online, they were transmitted over point-to-point telephone lines so balances could be updated in real time. For the customer, the visible benefits were automatic updating of the passbook and faster answers to account queries