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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.
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
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.
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...
And Watson *isn't* just marketing?
Watson wins jeopardy!!.... erm no, it has to be fed the questions in electronic form and just looks up the result faster than the people comprehend the language.
Watson cures cancer!! erm no, it just looks for the DNA correlations, nothing but basic data mining.
Watson does speech to text... erm no you just branded your Nuance products as Watson's APIs and they are still shit.
Not really a product, because even big corps know there is nothing behind it of substance. More a way to market to patent judges when ajudicating on their latest patent troll application.
Here is a video of one in action ... built like a tank...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
To be fair, not many marketing companies file 8000 patents per year, as IBM did in 2016. I'm sure they're not all for earth-shattering discoveries, but there has to be some meaningful R&D in there.
Oh no... it's the future.
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...
I'd be completely fine with earning nearly $12b in net income by "not innovating" and selling my services to some of the largest customers in the world to make society run.
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.
What about patent overlap between companies?
Apple has the patent on the wheel with rounded corners!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, 132 characters was the standard and the first column was carriage control. A "1" meant new page.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
Authority? I overheard it in our raised floor, freezing cold, glass windows in walls computer room.
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.
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. :-)
More precisely, the I/O services wrote 133-column lines, but only 132 columns were actually written to the printer.
The first column was pinched off and used as the print control character by the printer driver. It was either a printable character or an actual low-level printer opcode. If it was a character and the I/O control block options were configured right, then the driver simply converted it into its machine opcode equivalent.
Since you didn't have any control over font faces, point sizes, or even italics and boldfacing (short of overprinting) a single carriage-motion command was sufficient for an entire print line. Later, more flexible printers (typically dot-matrix ones to begin with) offered mid-line changes, and so they employed escape sequences embedded within the text, but technically the column-1 print control was never part of the text at all.
This is just sad.