50 years chip card - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 2019 - 80 Euro Cent

It measures a good 46 square centimetres and, at 0.762 millimetres, is as thin as a piece of cardboard. It opens doors, counts time and pays. It knows who we are, what we like to buy and how we are doing. We are talking about the chip card, which as a bank or credit card, as an identity card and access to the workplace with time recording function, as a health card for health insurance companies, as a service and customer card and as a SIM card in mobile phones has become an indispensable part of our everyday lives. The history of smart cards began in Germany at the end of the 1960s, when inventors Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff filed several patents. The most important was the one filed with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office on September 10, 1969, which laid the foundations for all later chip card applications. The world's first chip card with the dimensions still commonly used today in cheque card format (85.60 x 53.98 mm) was produced in 1979. At the beginning of the 1980s, chip cards were tested in mass production, and since then their triumphal march has been unstoppable.