We were building this before it had a name.

The company name says what the work is: Data Management Systems. Data.

We built the first Turkish product running on Mobitex — wireless packet data, years before consumer mobile data existed. The network operator recorded it with a plaque.

Describing our work to a chamber-of-commerce magazine, we listed three things: fingerprint security, collecting data from vehicles, and a vending machine that takes a credit card. None of the three existed in the field in Turkey at the time.

The card-paying machine was on the stand, with the line printed across it: "now, using your credit card…" Pepsi's own leaflet later described it as "presented to the press at the Bilişim 99 and Bilişim 2000 fairs, at the Corbuss stand." This is our work, photographed, at a fair of 113,000 visitors and 745 exhibiting companies.

At the same fair, visitors also sent an instruction from a mobile phone to a machine and took a drink — the operator's own service, launched there. The trade press listed it among the fair's firsts, on the same page as IBM's wearable PC and Windows 2000.

We built the product line on a single electronic board: telemetry, control of electromechanical machines that have no protocol at all, and card payment. The counterpart in the data centre was called Gateway 2000.

The machine was at the same fair. Pepsi's leaflet says it was "presented to the press at the Corbuss stand at the Bilişim 99 and Bilişim 2000 fairs." A visitor walking that stand wrote up the services on offer that week, and listed "credit-card vending service" among them.

The clearest statement of what this was comes from the customer. Pepsi's own promotional leaflet says, in capitals: "FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TURKEY, CREDIT CARD PAYMENT IS STARTING IN VENDING — AT PEPSI VENDING MACHINES." The other print of the same leaflet ties it to the Yapı Kredi partnership. And on the same paper it is written whose application that was: "Credit card VM-POS/C™ technology supplied by DMS Tech." So "first in Turkey" is not our sentence — it is the customer's, and we are simply the party named on the same page.

A trade magazine confirms the same stand independently: writing the following year, Telepati describes the application as "also shown at the Corbuss stand at the Bilişim 2000 fair," and adds that it had by then been trialled on 25 machines for a year and a half. Three accounts, one stand — a customer's leaflet, a visitor's write-up, a magazine.

The machines were installed in metro stations. The launch leaflet printed for that rollout lists what they accept: coins, tokens, a smart card, transit tickets used on public transport, and a credit card.

Placement and payment method were two halves of one decision: a machine in a metro station has to take the transit ticket.

After eighteen months and a 25-machine trial, a service contract was signed. Wireless — no telephone line was ever run to a machine.

This is the year the press picked it up, and two magazines named us: the weekly Telepati wrote that "the system integration was done by DMS tech," and the business magazine Ekonomist ran the same launch weeks earlier — illustrated with a photograph that also sits on our own website, archived.

That August a television news site covered another Pepsi machine — one you bought from by phone. At launch it played a jingle when you called the short code, and then the machine dispensed. The report credited the communications supplier for the jingle side and said nothing about the machine side; Pepsi's own leaflet prints that division in full — card technology to DMS Tech, communications to the partner.

The jingle was dropped soon after. What stayed was the part underneath: you called, you got the product, and the price went onto your mobile account. That service ran for years — the short code was 8099.

Our own website listed what we did: existing vending machines, taximeters, parking meters, turnstiles, doors, fuel pumps. And the phrase we used to describe ourselves: protocol converters, gateways.

The service that started in 2001 was now simply part of the field. Users called 8099, took a product from the machine, and the cost appeared on their phone bill. User comments from those years are still online: "great service for anyone who doesn't want to deal with coins."

The same year we put the third generation of the payment unit into series production.

We named the central system: country server, VPN, reporting. What is now called a telemetry platform.

Around two thousand machines were being monitored online. On our own stand that year the range on show was telemetry, payment and product variety at once — including a DVD rental machine for Kanal D Home Video, and a chipped-potato machine.

The DVD machine reached the press, and — unusually for us — it was named: in one week two publications and the customer's own website all credited the machines to VEND-e-VEND. Kanal D Home Video put it on their own news page under the headline "A first in Turkey: the film machine!", and inside the story they put both halves in one sentence: "Kanal D Home Video, taking part in VENDING EXPO 2007 together with the VEND-e-VEND company, is achieving a first in Turkey by selling DVDs from machines." The claim and the name beside it are both in the customer's own hand — we quote it as theirs.

Another machine on the same stand carried a transit card. We put a touchscreen into the middle of a Pepsi machine and ran Akbil top-up on it — and the top-up was paid by credit card, so loading a transit card went through the bank-card flow already running on that machine. The screen was not just a top-up form either: the point was to turn the machine into an interactive city experience. At the fair it was not sitting in a display case; it was demonstrated working. Akbil is the ancestor of the Istanbulkart — this is the first link in a chain that reaches the Istanbulkart twelve years later.

It went into service, too: one was installed at the Opet petrol station in Mecidiyeköy, Istanbul. And it was still news six months later — in June 2008 the same machine, selling by credit card only, went to the Cardist card-industry fair at Lütfi Kırdar. So this was not a one-off launch announcement.

It also turned out to be a dead end: the product it sold was on its way out.

Every payment unit in the field was replaced with the new controller and a contactless reader, in a migration spread over two years.

Mid-migration, a trade magazine put it on the record: interviewed in August 2009, the bottling company's own director credited the card-payment mechanisms to DMS Tech, by name.

We had registered our manufacturer code in the vending industry's data transfer standard (EVA DTS) in May 2008. The July 2009 edition is the earliest published list held in public archives — and on it are three companies from Turkey, ourselves among them.

The closed-loop system went live under its own name: CSC / AnyID. Three things at once — closed-loop credit, loyalty, and entitlement. Staff buy from the machine with the badge they already carry to work, against an allowance their employer defines. AnyID is the point: the credential can be a magnetic card, a smart card, an access badge — whatever the site already uses.

The same year, Visa Europe ran a May campaign for merchants accepting contactless, and PepsiCo won it: their sites took the largest month-on-month increase in contactless payments in the country. The contactless terminals on those machines were ours.

NFC was running on the machines.

The launch coverage did something the rest of this page rarely gets: it named the product. The reports describe the machines as carrying VMPOS — our unit — and list what it accepts: magnetic stripe, contactless, the bank's debit cards, cards eligible for spending loyalty points, and NFC. That list is the 2008 work still running three years on, loyalty redemption included. The company name is absent; the product name is not.

PepsiCo announced it on their own global site that December, with the scale attached: 1,200 NFC-equipped machines already placed across Turkey — universities, hospitals, subway stations — and another 1,100 due in January. That page has since gone from the web entirely; the screenshot below is the only copy we have of it.

We photographed the fleet. In it, running on the same solution: electromechanical machines from the 1990s with no protocol at all, connected by relay and voltage sensing; and MDB machines from two different manufacturers, connected by serial protocol.

The same year we took our own stand at PepsiCo's global event in Dubai and presented the solution directly to global leadership. A month later a credit card pilot went live with PepsiCo at New Delhi Airport.

Nothing happened here worth an entry. We include the year because of what happened elsewhere.

We developed acceptance of meal-benefit cards at the machine, working with the scheme's own project teams. The first scheme went live in 2018: Setcard.

The schemes came online one after another: Setcard in 2018, Multinet and Ticket/Edenred in 2019, Metropol in 2020. Four schemes in three years. Each one is a separate integration; the machine now accepts more than one card type.

Over the same period the payment started going cardless — on the Pluxee side the work moved to QR. The machine side of the meal voucher's journey, from paper to card to QR, was built in these three years.

The city transit card is accepted at public water machines; the device screen reads DMS Tech. The same idea arriving a second time: in 2007 we were running Akbil top-up on a touchscreen machine, and that was a contact token. This time the card itself had changed — we did the same job on the transit card's new-generation technology.

We moved to a cardless flow: the meal scheme now also works by QR. The Muscat Airport project went live — a third, separate protocol with Ingenico Oman, running over the national bank and the national payment network; the terminal's own screen again read DMS Tech. Ltd.

And the machine we exhibited on our own stand that year was not a vending machine at all: a milk dispenser driven by a PLC. No MDB, no Executive — industrial automation hardware.

A year after go-live, the solution is working in the field at Muscat Airport: the payment layer on the coffee machines is ours, over the third of the three protocols.

At home, the same layer is on Tchibo To Go's coffee machines — the distributor's own site describes the card solution on them as ours. Coffee is not a side vertical here: it is where a payment device meets the public most often.

HERO shipped and the edge device is in the field. The product isn't frozen; it grows by being updated.

We are still registered in the industry's data standard. In 2009 we were one of three companies from Turkey on that list; today there are eight, and we are still on it.