Credit: A Card with Smarts

The plastic credit cards that millions of people use every day have at least one feature in common: in technological terms, they are all dumb. Soon, however, many people will be carrying "smart" cards equipped with tiny electronic brains similar to those now found in everything from cars to computers. French scientists have developed a card containing a microchip that can store at least 100 times as much data as the magnetic strips on standard charge plates.

The new cards can hold information ranging from the amount of credit a consumer has left to any medicines to which he might be allergic. By using special machines that read the smart cards, sales clerks can approve credit purchases instantly, without having to phone a central headquarters for authorization. In addition, the cards are almost impossible to counterfeit.

French banks and credit-card issuers plan to switch completely to smart cards by 1988. In the U.S., MasterCard will launch the first smart-card experiment this fall by giving out about 100,000 of them in Columbia, Md., and Palm Beach, Fla. If that pilot program goes well, MasterCard may begin national distribution as early as 1986.