Moreno, Roland

Moreno was born into a family of Egyptian Jews on June 11, 1945 in Cairo , Egypt. His last name was originally Bahbout, but the family changed his last name to Moreno after moving to France.

At 15, Roland came to study in Paris. He worked as a clerk in the office, then went to reporters in the detective magazine Détective Magazine and at the same time as a courier in the L'Express news magazine, and by 1970 he became news editor in the chemical publication Chimie-Actualités.

Roland was attracted by the creation of new ideas - what is now called "intellectual property." He developed the first computer program that compiled names for brands and firms, combining selected vocabulary units. This idea was later licensed by Nomen.

Smart Card

The idea of ​​a smart memory card was patented by Moreno on March 25, 1974. Initially, the idea was to make a smart card by enclosing it in a ring to be worn on the hand.

By the beginning of 1975, a plastic card was made, and a year later he demonstrated electronic payment by credit card. Moreno loved Woody Allen’s films, so he called his project “Take the money and run” for his film, TMR for short. He later rearranged the letters on RMT - Ronald Moreno Technology.

A smart card was born under the French name “la carte à puce”, but French marketers were slow and humanity received this miracle in the English version. The cards began to be used by the French paid telephone system, but things were moving slowly. The technology was quite expensive, in addition, not everyone believed in its reliability. The history of Smart Cards is inseparable on behalf of the French programmer Serge Umpis. In 2000, he showed that you can create fake bank cards that work everywhere: the famous YesCards. The bank card company called him an attacker. As for Moreno, he for his part stated that the security of the Smart Card is unscathed, and offered a million francs to anyone who cracked the code of his device. Until today, no one has been able to crack it.

Gradually, banks and transport systems got the opportunity to track card usage not only by time, but also in space, by the method of triangulation by masts of mobile communications. American Express introduced the first Blue Card payment smart card only in 1999.

The success of the introduction of smart cards brought Moreno money: his company Innovatron earned more than € 150 million in royalties from the use of smart cards ^[1] .

Moreno dreamed of being immortalized, but not in bronze, but in wax, as in Madame Tussauds. “God owes much to Johann Sebastian Bach,” Moreno once said, “I would like people to remember what France owes me.”

About his invention of a smart card, Roland Moreno said in 2005: “I can stop any passerby on the streets of Paris and he will have at least three samples of my invention in his pocket.”

Rewards

For his inventions, Moreno was recognized as the national hero of France and was awarded the title of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 2009.

Other inventions

Moreno invented three musical devices - piezo, pianok and calculuette, created the Deliro radio station (now inactive), a website with quizzes and a site for playing poker.

Books

Roland Moreno is also known as the author of books: Eureka (Eurêka, 1988), Chip - Secret History (Carte à puce, l'histoire secrète, 2002), Bachotron (Bachotron, 2002), Selimena (Célimène , 2003).

Death

Roland Moreno passed away on April 22, 2012 in Paris at the age of 66. ^[2]

• Smart card