But we are talking about the very first years of what is likely to be a centuries-long historical era. By 1971, most of these changes had not even begun. The American Express card, the first general-purpose credit card, had been invented a mere thirteen years before, and the modern national credit-card system had only really come into being with the advent of Visa and MasterCard in 1968. Debit cards came later, creatures of the 1970s, and the current, largely cashless economy only came into being in the 1990s.
