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How the IBM 1403 Printer Hammered Out 1,100 Lines Per Minute (ieee.org)
schwit1 quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The IBM 1460, which went on sale in 1963, was an upgrade of the 1401 [which was one of the first transistorized computers ever sold commercially]. Twice as fast, with a 6-microsecond cycle time, it came with a high-speed 1403 Model 3 line printer. The 1403 printer was incredibly fast. It had five identical sets of 48 embossed metal characters like the kind you'd find on a typewriter, all connected together on a horizontal chain loop that revolved at 5.2 meters per second behind the face of a continuous ream of paper. Between the paper and the character chain was a strip of ink tape, again just like a typewriter's. But rather than pressing the character to the paper through the ink tape, the 1403 did it backward, pressing the paper against the high-speed character chain through the ink tape with the aid of tiny hammers. Over the years, IBM came out with eight models of the 1403. Some versions had 132 hammers, one for each printable column, and each was individually actuated with an electromagnet. When a character on the character chain aligned with a column that was supposed to contain that character, the electromagnetic hammer for that column would actuate, pounding the paper through the ink tape and into the character in 11 microseconds. With all 132 hammers actuating and the chain blasting along, the 1403 was stupendously noisy [...] The Model 3, which replaced the character chain with slugs sliding in a track driven by gears, took just 55 milliseconds to print a single line. When printing a subset of characters, its speed rose from 1,100 lines per minute to 1,400 lines per minute.
Now? Not so much. A few good things here and there like Watson, but basically just a marketing company masquerading as a computer company.
A blend of band printer speed, with dot-matrix flexibility. The print stream could include a change of fonts, so a title or chapter could print in large, bold font, and the body in regular serif font.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Why write a summary when you can simply reproduce (nearly) the entire article.
Lame.
What I miss about the demise of these beasts is the the essentially unlimited supply of fan-fold paper that could be used for everything from drawing really long diagrams that went round all four walls of the office to making paper hats for kids' birthday parties. It had to be very high quality to avoid getting shredded as it flew through the printer. They were indeed v. noisy but anyone in the same room as them went deaf so the problem was sorta self-limiting. C.
The real wizards then were the ones that kept those beasts running. Would really like to see a present day IT try it, just once!
I worked with ICL (now Fujitsu) printers of the same type and generation. One great console command we had was TE peripheral-number. If you used that on a printer, it would print a couple of pages of solid lines of characters, thus making a horrendous noise. So you waited until someone was beside the printer collecting printouts or starting to change the box of paper then let it rip.
Computers provide less physical fun now that these printers, the tape drives and the blinking lights are gone. Happy days!
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Carriage Control tapes, massive static shocks, rotating printer ribbons to try and keep them running true.
The good old days!
I found an old printout among some old maths books. Our school was close to the NUIG university engineering building and the professor had invited our maths class to learn how to program the IBM 1800 computer. This was one of my first programs. http://2eo.blogspot.ie/2014/04...
Here is a video of one in action ... built like a tank...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I can tell by your commenting style you are grumpy old fart, go yell at a chair.
It has been speculated that this printer was the primary reason IBM was so successful selling the 14xx line and the IBM 360+ line. By far the best (speed, quality, reliability) printer of its time, it carried the actual computers with it. Alas, that great IBM is no more....
Here's the Tiger Rag on one. All that noise wasn't purely used for evil.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
of real engineering. Sadly long gone.
well, not quite music, but when we printed checks, forms, or similar material -- where every page was identical in terms of where you needed to print something, then the cadence of the sound would tell us -- from way outside the computer room -- what specific print job was running.
amazing stuff...
Tally-Genicom printers that can do 1500 lines. I used a lower model years back to crank out mailing labels. It was beautiful.
I remember the sound of the printer pounding out Raquel Welch in a skimpy skin suit from 1000000 BC movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Years_B.C.
I remember my first post-university job in 1972 at Alpha Industries, a microwave house. They took me on to work with an HP 8542A automatic microwave network analyzer on which they invested a quarter of a million. It was 3-4 full height relay racks of equipment including the excellent HP 2100A mini, which had as I recall a full staggering 16K of magnetic core RAM, and an impressive set of peripherals including a 300 cps high speed optical paper tape reader, high speed paper tape punch, a huge heavy-duty ASR-35 TTY ... ... and ... a gigantic CDC 300 lpm rotary drum line printer built like a Sherman tank, the make and model I can't recall. It was cowled with sound absorbent structures, but when you raised the top of that baby to revel in watching it print, the deafening staccato noise was enough to put a boiler factory to shame. When it printed out a long line of dashes, there was a crash like the crack of doom as all the hammers came down at the same instant.
Everything was on preventive maintenance with an HP specialist. As I remember it, the mini was phenomenally reliable, mostly just burned out indicator lights, but all the peripherals broke down all the time. We called the tape reader the "tape render", the tape punch the "tape pinch". Except for the ASR-35. It was night and day to the shitty light duty model 33 which the hoi polloi didn't know any better than to stick themselves with. That model 35 just soldiered on. Somebody broke the glass window once or twice leaning on it, and the type box shed a key once every few years (and the type box was swapped out in about 30 seconds), but other than that it was NEVER down.
The microwave test equipment and the HPIB connecting it all was actually quite reliable.
I had pretty much free reign in my own spacious air-conditioned room. I shared with an assistant production and development testing duties for the product line on the network analyzer, but the fun part was, I got to write customized test programs in FORTRAN and HP BASIC.
I worked at a refinery that used these for general reports in the control rooms and i absolutely dont miss them. These things weighed as much as a refrigerator, cost as much as a small car, and required weekly service. chain oil, bar lubes, and cleaning with isopropyl and solvents were the norm. the old posix "lp0 on fire" warning was not really a joke, as failure to let these machines dry out after service would cause them to catch fire due to residual alcohol. We paid IBM an extra $20k to retrofit the cabinets with soundproofing foam in some of the more public spaces these had to be installed.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm assuming this stupid thing is the reason my company's report standards cap lines at 132 characters and always leave the first byte of a line blank except for the occasional unexplained 0/1 character. No idea if our clients still even own one...
Good grief man! Microseconds sounds a little bit to fast to be mechanical, even if they worked in parallel. ? Are you sure it was not milliseconds? Sounds more like a rail gun speed. And even they don't last long. https://www.quora.com/How-plau...
Did you need to call in an airstrike?
Chairs are for throwing. Clouds are for yelling at.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Also the maintenance on this printer costs a lot. After a while those hammers get misaligned and takes hours to correct. Printing a bunch of H to make sure the hammer hit in the center. Plus a lot of moving parts makes it just as expensive to operate. Today you can get a cheap printer for better value over the long run
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What was slightly unnerving about them was the fact that the characters would be slightly off-register, both vertically and horizontally. This was because the paper and the band of characters were constantly in motion.
At least once, my program in Fortran, which had many IF/THEN loops, had an unfortunate page feed loop.
I can attest to how high the paper flew out of the old IBM printer and how fast a box of paper was emptied. It happened before you could react to stop it.
I don't remember the model (or even manufacturer) but it could print faster than other printers could form-feed.
Ah, yes! The only text printer I ever ran that you had to wear PPE (personal protection equipment) to operate! It was like a chainsaw with type instead of cutting teeth...
"Moogs! Would YOU buy that for a quarter?" CMK
Have a look at their mainframe division. AS/400 is also still kicking. Those boxes run for years unattended until upgrade time rolls around.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I don't recall exactly what model it was, but about 15 years ago when I worked for IBM, the customer I managed had a whooooole lot of IBM printers connected to their maintrame terminals. I remember the support desk used to get the odd call where the printer jammed mid printing and it would burn the paper, not a full on fire but scorched ostensibly from all the friction. Although this was rare, they often needed a service call afterwards so it was kind of an expensive paper jam.
What I recall about these printers was the ballistic sheet feed velocity. The paper was thrown out of it so fast that it was just sort of floaring down and landing in a pile more than being placed there by an guides.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That was the song I heard on a 1403. Stirring!
Why do you hate space so much when your mom takes up such a huge amount of it?
I'm old enough to remember a time when some teachers refused to accept term papers printed on a dot-matrix printer because, you know, appearances are more important than the quality of the prose. So, a buddy of mine and I found this nifty gadget called a Dynatyper which was a box filled with solenoid plungers. You mounted this thing on top of the keyboard of an electric typewriter. You typed your paper into the computer, edited to your hearts' content, checked your spelling (because no spell checkers in those days) and when you printed it, the Dynatyper magically typed it for you. Granted, you had to stop between pages to put a new piece of paper in the typewriter but it worked. Moral: never, ever tell a nerd that they can't use technology to solve a problem.
Yes I remember printing on band printer in college. I remember printing lines of underlines with a no CR (what was that, a "+" ?) :) noisy suckers.
When I was a boy, I saw this printer during a tour with an unusual demo. Because of the high speed hammering of paper, printer a carefully designed job would create a melody such as Jingle Bells.
Why do you reject Earth so much when it's the only place you'll ever live?
Authority? I overheard it in our raised floor, freezing cold, glass windows in walls computer room.
Is seeing the number of posters bearing 5-digit and low 6-digit slashdot ID numbers.
Dozens of students huddled around a printer waiting for the results of their deck of punch cards (often just a message that a typo was encountered). A header was printed at the start of each job. The sound of the header print became as recognizable as that of an opening chord of a song. When it played, all of Pavlov's programmers jostled for position to see if the output was for their job. I still remember the sound. The memory still produces anxiety. Maybe it is a form of PTSD - Print Tool Stress Syndrome.
A technician or cleaning person died in the datacenter at SSA in the early 80's when I worked there (I didn't know her personally) on the midnight shift, probably the summer of '82. The printers were often cleaned running with the covers up, and she had a badge on a braided cloth necklace. The printers were cleaned with a handheld vacuum cleaner. She leaned a bit too far over the cover and the band caught her badge and instantly pulled the cloth strap in as well. It was about 20 minutes before the resident IBM guy got on up to the printer room to see what had created the fault...
We were all given new badge hangers the next shift, and I've never worn one that didn't have a breakaway element to it. Word to the wise...
French - The lingua franca of Europe!
For anyone interested in printer history: Webster, Edward (2001). Print Unchained: 50 Years of Digital Printing, 1950-2000 and Beyond. Dra of Vermont. ISBN 0-9702617-0-5. I spent 15 years with GENICOM and TallyGenicom in tech support. The company grew by buying out other printer businesses such as Centronics, Digital and Texas Instruments.
Wonder what kind of RF noise that created. Don't imagine they shielded much back then...
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
In retrospect, it's amazing how much paper the web saves. At the end of an accounting or "reporting" period, say approximately a month depending on the org, giant reports would be printed up with a hierarchical breakdown of whatever was being tracked, sometimes a foot thick. Often multiple copies were printed for different managers and executives. End-of-period report printing resembled a news-paper operation.
The reports allowed managers to see the roll-up of high-level statistics, medium-level statistics, all the way down to "detail" lines with specific transactions, objects, or events per line. It was a simple hierarchy, averaging around say 4 levels, so they were pretty easy for managers to relate to. Trees are bees' knees. (Of course there were always odd domain-specific caveats to deal with, or marketing inventing odd hybrid categories for purposes explained with PHB buzzwords if you asked. But these goofy exceptions are job security.)
And the same info was often printed in at least two ways: by location (such as sales stores and regions), and another report by a category hierarchy, such as product category, somewhat like Amazon's drop-down category menu, but usually with more levels. This allowed managers to compare categories and their changes (trends) to each other.
Often semi-summary and summary versions were also printed, without the detail lines. Some variations compared to several older periods, to monitor longer trends. Of course, these didn't take up nearly as much paper.
Assuming you got clean data and the right tools, these mega-hierarchy reports were fairly straight-forward to program. (Older orgs often had convoluted data sources or structures and needed a lot of data cleaning and adjusting to make it report-able.)
The web-based interactive versions of the same thing are not always so straight-forward, in part because being online gives you more options, such as query-by-example (match criteria) instead of just a hierarchy. They often end up being hybrids between hierarchies and query-by-example, making them potentially more confusing and thus need more feedback and tuning to make them easy for managers to use.
I tend to make such too "meta", with factored abstractions that allows the same concept to bend to multiple needs. But these often confuse users and thus I often have to dumb them down, adding redundancy to make it easier for users to mentally digest. They have to see specifics from their domain, or they wig out.
Less "computer operators" are now needed to manage the online equivalent of the printers and report distribution, but more programmers and DBA's are needed to tune the UI's and databases for interactive reporting.
This reflects a general trend of our economy of more engineering and less "operators" babysitting machines such as command consoles, printers, and physical report distribution. There are fewer "middle-men" between the technology and user, but the flip side is the technology has to be more sophisticated to compensate for lack of intermediaries to help the end-user get their info. The middle is being hollowed out.
But, the web certainly saves paper. Younger managers almost never print out thick hierarchical reports: they expect it to all be online (and exportable to spreadsheets so they can fiddle with it on their own).
Table-ized A.I.
I have to ask, and I might not get an answer since I'm anonymous...
In the movie "Desk Set", they show during the open credits an IBM printer with an odd bit of mechanics typing things out. I don't believe the font and output was correct, but I think at least the mechanism was.
Anyone know what printer that might have been? I get that its a long time ago, but maybe some film geek has the answer. Wikipedia doesn't have much on that aspect of the movie.
Thanks in advance!
My paean to the IBM 1403, with which I've spent many loving days and nights:
The clunky printer attached to the IBM 709 "mainframe" computer was a slow, lumbering monster. But the practice, in the day, was to use the smaller (only $250,000) IBM 1401 computer to load decks of program/data punched cards onto tape, the tape "mounted on the IBM 709" "mainframe" for execution, then the program's output to be written to tape (our 709 had 8--later 12--729 tape drives), and carried back to the IBM 1401 for printing of results. A "job ticket" specified which card decks went to tape, and which tapes would then be sent to the IBM 1403 attached to the 1401. And, that was the marvel: It could print several hundred pages in just a few minutes, often as graphs composed of asterisks, dashes, and other symbols, representing the points on the axes and the data points computed. Crude graphs, to be sure, but very effective to show non-technical executives. All in marvelous black (or blue) on white paper
The 1403 was the star of the show. Nobody much cared about the support task of copying boxes of punched cards to tape. They loved watching the lights on the huge "front desk" of the 709, the source of most TV footage of "a computer at work," in the day. But, they loved the speed, efficiency, quality, and distinctive (but relative quiet of the closed-box printer cabinetry) sound of that 1403. It meant we had results to see! Those of us who moved beyond FORTRAN (the preferred language on the big 709) found the 1401 computer a delight to program, with a memory structure of variable-length words with a "word mark" bit to distinguish the end of a string of characters...an architecture I'd love to see revived.
But, the 1403 was the workhorse of the business, and its' star performer. When results of huge warfare simulation models, or Linear Programming model forecasts of macroeconomic possibilities, often with foot-high stacks of large, wide pages emerged from the back of the 1403...faster than one could read them...everyone looked for the "macro trends" of big areas of ink (or barren spans of white), they gave insight into the likely success or failure of the most recent changes in the models...and, occasionally presaged teentsy bugs that had created hugely errant results.
Given the technology of the day (the laser was yet to be invented) all these technologies in the emergent era of modern computers were marvels, and the IBM 1403 was the most effective tool of them all. Without that ability to produce massive reams of output for later analysis by mathematicians and programmers, and executives, and analysts, we'd've never made the subsequent leaps that have led to the cellphones we have today.
ANECDOTE: True Side-Story about the masses of blinking lights on the 709. We were hard by the Pentagon, and contractors used our "service bureau" at C-E-I-R for doing warfare modelling. Most programmers cleverly used control over some of the 709's console lights to indicate progress, or other information. At $800/hour (in the 1960's) it was important to know of the results were likely to be good or bad, so we could quickly terminate the latter to save money. One fellow was building naval warfare simulation models, considering different weapons and tactics to maximize the achievement of battle outcomes, and he used one bank of lights to indicate which kinds of targets were being destroyed in the simulated battle. One day, I'm watching the lights flickering at a decent rate, when the programmer in charge of building and testing the model was watching those lights blinking, and suddenly, leapt out of his chair, reaching for the "kill" button, exclaiming, at the top of his lungs, "The Damned Thing's Attacking CARGO Ships!!!", as he pressed the button to reset the computer! No 1403 output from THAT job. :-)
You know DICE doesn't own /. anymore right?
This is just sad.
Today cheap bla bla. Thank you captain obvious. Or captain retard. I wonder if computers are cheap. Orrrr evevrything electronic. Ill decide you are captain retard.
The first computer I studied was the IBM 1401. I studied it but never worked on it. My father bought me a book on the 1401 in the summer of 1977 and I read that book from cover to cover at least 10 times before I went off to college where I got my first hands-on experience with A Burroughs 5700 computer. I was fortunate to become a student operator and a programmer during the off semesters and I spent nearly every waking moment on that computer, and I even found a few what we today would be called hacks. lol. As it was primary a card-base machine with terminals as well, only one program could be run at a time on a terminal, except I found a series of keystrokes that disconnected the terminal from the application and allowed multiple programs to be attached to one terminal.
Interesting story and it brings back a few memories of working with line printers and the paper programs that they used to determine how far to slew to a top of page for the appropriate paper size. :)
could get all the hammers to fire at the same time, Do that over and over in your PL/I program in introductory programming class and the TA takes you aside for a lecture, after getting flack from the system operators.
Almost as much fun as overprinting rows of underscores, then a form feed, so the paper breaks.
A remarkable triumph of design and engineering. Pushing so much speed out of relatively simple mechanics and electronics was quite a feat.
Nowadays a good laser printer can print faster; 30 pages per minute is the equivalent of about 1,800 lines per minute. And that's only a midrange printer; a really high end printer can do double or more that speed. But it's not impressive in the same way, just as a TGV going 200 miles per hour doesn't have the same visceral impact as a steam engine going 100 miles per hour.
In those days, a misbehaving job would usually involve a memory dump being made of the program in error. No core files, it would all go to dead tree in a mixture of hex and ebcdic. It was down to you to look at the binary to tray and work out what went wrong. Most compiler/linkers were good about giving you the memory addresses of your data areas though.
The letters on the chain were ordered so that only a few of the solenoids would be activated at a time when printing normal jobs. If you checked the exact order on the chain, you could insert a string which would make all the solenoids activate at the same time. The chain, which would be travelling at a speed of many meters per second would come to a full stop, when all the 132 solenoids hit at once. This would wreck the printer.
I got lucky and got a student job in the computer repair group in college (NERDC?) It was during the last few years of punch cards / hammer printers and the beginning of PC labs.
One of our jobs was to repair the 132 pin printers. There were 132 individual hammers that could be individually replaced / tuned. We'd get a report that some of the columns were light or had some other problems. We'd go in and first try tuning the hammer impact strength by slightly bending the hammers. I can't remember it well any more but I think new hammers had to be tuned also. Sometimes you got luck and sometimes you were there for a while. A couple of the techs developed a real feel for the tweaks that returned the printouts to best appearance.
Less fun was the job of fixing card reader machines. They had blowers and rollers that separated the cards before sucking them into the machine to be read. Students would often put their card stacks in the readers without taking the rubber bands off. The rubber bands would then get pulled into the machine and wound around rollers. Of course it was always "some other person" that had done that when we got the repair call.
I loved that job and the team. It was like being part of a backstage crew.