The proliferation of credit cards happened before the proliferation of the internet. How did credit cards work before the internet?
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Back in the old, old days, you would hand your card over and the vendor had a little roller machine they put your card in with a carbon copy slip with 4 (I think) copies. They entered the details of the sale on the slip, rolled the machine over the slip and your card which imprinted your card details on the slip (this is why card numbers are raised, so they imprint on the slip). Then you sign the slip, take a copy, the vendor kept a copy and the other copies went to banks, which treated it essentially as a kind of cheque to draw on your account, with the card services (Visa, mastercard, Amex etc) operating as the go-between for the banks.
If the transaction was large, the cashier would call the card company for authorisation first.
Then they started using the magnetic strip on the back, which doesn’t depend on “the internet” as you know it, but just a data transfer for the point of sale system.
And then chips, and then NFC chips, and now you don’t even need the card.
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