Twenty years before…

When a bank sends a client the PIN to a payment card, no one may see it along the way — including the people producing the envelope. The answer was a technology called pressure seal: the form is printed, folded and sealed by pressure in one continuous machine run, with no human touch and no separate envelope.

That is exactly what we supplied and operated in Slovakia. Machine envelope-processing lines, printing systems, barcodes verifying that a mailing was complete, scanning systems for back-checks. Our customers were banks, insurance companies, healthcare and payroll processors.

Another part was public administration. Bulk official correspondence, decisions, assessments — everything that has to go out in the exact count, in the exact order and with a provable trail. Later we added our own software for mobile asset inventory with tablets and barcodes, which cut inventories from days to hours.

Paper as a medium has since faded away. Banks send PINs to mobile apps and offices communicate electronically. That business is dead, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

But it left us with something money cannot buy: respect for systems where a mistake is not an inconvenience but real damage. When we design an authorization server or cloud infrastructure today, we approach it the same way we once approached a line that must never mix up two envelopes.