Magnetic Stripes and reading them

[ROM_Jeremy]

Good day.

I have recently become very interested in magnetic stripes; how they store data, how the data is read etc. They are something we use every day in our lives but what few people fully understand, and as a result, there is little documentation avaiable (from what I can find) that goes in debth about them. I want to learn everything I can about them, which is why I am posting here; to ask if anybody knows of some good documentation about magnetic stripe cards and readers?

Thanks.

 

[mgb_phys]

The format of the data is described in ISO 7813 and 4909
This page has a summary (ISO standards are expensive to buy)
http://www.gae.ucm.es/~padilla/extrawork/tracks.html

 

[berkeman]

The intro at wikipedia.org is fairly good, with useful references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe_card


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