Visa: half a century of high availability

From the Fresno drop in 1958 and through Visa’s first 15 years of existence, an authorization with a Visa card was processed by having the merchant call either the cardholder’s bank, if the card was regional, or a switching center to be forwarded onto the bank if it was not. In the early 70s, the overhead of this reached a breaking point and Visa set out to build what would become known as “BankAmericard Authorization System Experimental (BASE)”—an electronic authorization system linking the Visa member banks with merchants or their acquiring centers through a central switching system.