Roland Moreno, the inventor of the smart card in 1974, died Sunday at the age of 66, leaving behind a technology that revolutionized uses around the world but whose patents had long since fallen into the public domain. .
Born June 11, 1945 in Cairo, this electronics enthusiast, with a scientific baccalaureate in his pocket, began an eclectic career which saw him successively runner-up for the weekly L'Express or employed in writing at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Jobs which did not prevent him from pursuing his great passion, electronic experiments.
In 1972 he founded the company Innovatron with the objective of "selling ideas". Two years later, he filed his first patents for the "memory card", an integrated circuit capable of containing and processing information.
"I found the solution in my sleep while dreaming. In truth, I am a big lazy person and I have a very low productivity", he told in 2006 to France Soir who asked him how he had invented the smart card .
"I am jealous, very spendthrift, totally sedentary and distracted. I have undoubtedly a professor Nimbus side", he declared then.
Two years earlier, he had estimated in an interview with the same newspaper to be "of public utility": "I say it without any modesty. I have made life easier for people, from the card of mobile phones to the Vitale card, via the Blue Card. But I do not deserve the Nobel Prize for all that, the chip is not a discovery but an invention ".
The invention of the smart card has led to multiple uses, such as the bank credit card, the SIM card used in mobile telephones or the Vitale de la Sécurité Sociale card.
But if Roland Moreno will file some 45 patents until 1979 - which would have brought him a total of 100 million euros - these patents in turn fell into the public domain after twenty years, the last having escaped him in 1999.
The company Innovatron then found itself in a very difficult financial situation, it laid off a large part of its staff and sold several of its activities.
Today, it is focusing in particular on the development of contactless cards, such as the one used for the Navigo pass used in Parisian public transport.
In 2000, Roland Moreno announced that he would offer one million francs to anyone who succeeded in violating an existing smart card within three months, a bet he had won.
Father of two daughters, Mr. Moreno was also the author of several books: Eurêka, Théorie du bordel ambient, and Carte à puce, the secret story.
He was made an officer of the Legion of Honor in 2009.
To France Soir who asked him if he had a fantasy, Roland Moreno replied: "I am already quoted in dictionaries such as Larousse or Littré, but my ambition would be to enter the Musée Grévin. For me, it would be the most formidable consecration ".
"It is said that God owes a lot to Johann Sebastian Bach. Well, I would like people to say that the French owe a lot to Moreno," he added.
Source: http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/topnews/ ... -puce.html
His wiki page: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Moreno
