Unlocking door security:

Humanity has tried to control who comes through their doors since the first straw hut was thatched together millennia ago. While initial efforts to control the flow of traffic focused on keeping the elements and wild animals at bay, over the course of time focus expanded to include barring strangers and ill-intentioned persons from gaining access to private food stores, belongings, and the family unit as a whole.To get more news about secure locks, you can visit securamsys.com official website.

For the most part, humanity has succeeded at keeping grizzly bears out of their foyers, but doors shoulder a heavier burden than ever as they are expected to perform more complex tasks. In the modern world, businesses especially have evolved past traditional lock-and-key options in favor of card access solutions, a door security technology that has revolutionized the way businesses handle who has access to their buildings and when. While doors have been around since the dawn of civilization, card access solutions aren’t even a hundred years old—and there’s reason to believe we’ve only scratched the surface of door security technology capabilities.
For many thousands of years, door locks were the only means of preventing people from entering/exiting a room or building outside of barricading a door shut. Archaeologists have discovered primitive locks that are 6,000 years old in various parts of the ancient world, eventually morphing from wooden apparatuses such as the Egyptian wooden pin lock into the metal lock-and-key design more familiar to modern eyes. Despite the handcrafting required to make each lock , the relative simplicity of these early contraptions made them “pickable” to professional thieves. Despite these limitations, the basic “lock-and-key” concept—where a physical key is required to gain access to a locked space—formed the basis of door security that exists to this day.

It wasn’t until the late 1700s that locks and keys evolved past a basic pins-and-bolts design—thanks in large part to the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution. The lever-tumbler lock, invented by Robert Barron in 1778, forewent pins entirely in his design, instead opting to have the key lift a lever to release the locking bolt. As the internal mechanisms of locks grew more advanced, so did keys, the heads and blades eventually taking the shape to which we are currently accustomed. The common Yale lock took the ancient Egyptian pin lock idea and brought it into the modern age by Linus Yale Sr. in 1848, its newest iteration coined the “pin-tumbler lock.”
With the ability to mass-produce and standardize products at unprecedented levels, the Industrial Revolution brought door security to the masses in an affordable way. Even though many of these innovations came over two centuries ago, conventional “locks and key” door security remains fundamentally the same, utilizing the basic level-tumbler and pin-tumbler concepts from the days of yore.
It wasn’t until later in the 20th century that door security began to resemble the advanced systems we are accustomed to now. In the 1970s, hotels began favoring “punch card” technology over conventional “lock and key” methods to improve both guest and staff experience. These punch cards required a cardholder to slide a unique card with raised bumps or holes into a “reader, which released the locking mechanism in a method similar to a pin-tumbler lock. These “punch cards” reached the peak of their popularity in the 1970s, especially once Norwegian engineer Tor Sørnes invented a card that could be re-coded instead of thrown away after each use. By the 1980s, however, punch cards had already become obsolete and replaced by electrified “magstripe” cards. The first magnetic-striped cards were invented in the 1960s and were initially made for data storage purposes (think debit and credit cards) before their use as a unique “key” in a door security system was fully realized. Magstripe cards were easy to activate or turn off and comparatively cheap to purchase (or replace). However, magstripe cards carried the same security vulnerabilities that eventually plagued credit cards. All magstripe cards eventually demagnetize. Also, based on how they are configured, magstripe card readers can be manipulated by informed hackers to gain access—a major concern for operations with high-value or sensitive inventory.

Two major inventions helped revolutionize card access systems into what they are today. Firstly, the internet transformed the world in the 1990s, allowing for server-based databasing and networking. Secondly, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) was created in part to overcome the demagnetization issues with magstripe cards. In RFID door security systems, unique identification data is programmed to a card (the “key”), and the card shares that data when it is near a card reader via electromagnetic waves. Depending on the design and device, RFID readers can pick up a card or fob from several inches to several feet away. The data is then run through the card access database, and if that card has been programmed to access that specific door, the magnetic lock disengages, granting access to the cardholder. By doing so, access control systems allow for the differentiation between those who are allowed in a certain area and those who are not. This entire process can happen in a fraction of a second!