An Even Briefer History of Smart Cards
1967 - Jürgen Dethloff invents the smart card computer.
1972 - 1993 Patents, standards and “security through obscurity” choke off applications and innovation.
1994 - MAOSCO and Keycorp create programmable smart cards.
1996 - Zeitcontrol and Schlumberger provide high-level languages.
1998 - Microsoft contributes a real file system and application development tools.
2000 - Smart cards become Internet nodes.