On 12/20/24 16:36, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: > The IBM 1403 printer had interchangeable print chains. I know of only > four 1403 printers still working — two at the Computer History Museum > in Mountain View, CA, one at the IBM Technology Center in Böblingen, > Germany, and one near Endicott, NY. > > All four have the 48-character "A" or "Business" chain, and CHM has a > 16-character numeric chain that allows the printer to run twice as fast > for numeric-only output. CHM doesn't have an "H" or "Fortran" chain, > and as far as I know, none of the others do. The difference is that > parentheses are % and "lozenge" — a square with indented edges > — apostrophe is @, and = is # on the "A" chain. IBM also had a 64- > character chain that included box and line drawing graphics. BTW, > nobody seems to know what "lozenge" was meant to represent.
I recall only learning once not to leave a cup of coffee atop a running 1403. I think the lozenge-character print train was mostly used on the BCD machines like the 1401, but I could be mistaken. I recall one of the old timers at CDC relating that try as they might, they couldn't get a train printer of their own design without the print train disintegrating. I believe that CDC quietly purchased a 1403 on the gray market and took it to pieces. The result was the CDC 512. Up until this time, the standard high-speed printer at CDC was the 501--a drum printer. It was interesting to note that hammer firing differences on a drum printer resulted in characters being vertically displaced, which was very annoying to the eye. Whereas the train printers could displace characters horizontally and was not nearly as unsightly. --Chuck
