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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!
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Here is a video of one in action ... built like a tank...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.
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