There were both band and chain type line printers. The chains and bands were changeable, but had to re-load controllers with new code if/when you changed them for alternate chains or bands. The chain printers (like the venerable IBM 1403N1) I spent many hours feeding while in college. We had one chain with both upper and lower case, but mainly use an upper case only chain. The upper only chain was used for most things because it was faster due to having 3 or 4 full sets of characters on the chain. The 1403 did a thousand lines a minute (roughly 60 characters per line for rating purposes), The upper/lower case chain had 2 alpha character sets and one numeric/special character set on a chain, so it was pretty slow.
The band printers were similar but slower (typically rated at 250 to 600 lpm) and the bands wore out faster (basically embossed metal band). Chain printers also could print up to 6 part copies with carbon paper (remember that?). Band printers couldn't strike as hard so it only did 2 or possibly 3 if very thin paper/carbons. NCR/pressure sensitive paper and lasers came about after I got out of college. I was a 'printer expert' (only because I was forced) at a oil company. We first got IBM 3812 'desktop' laser printers, and finally got the big roll fed lasers for the 'computer room'. Both had their strengths and weaknesses. But inkjets wound up being the king of the mountain for printing color seismic charts (4' wide and 50+' long, and lots of them). The inkjet replaced photographic color printer/plotters (and reduced the cost a LOT at the same time). Also reduced cost for large format b/w printing/plotting as well. Oh well, so for my history. Yes, at one time I owned a IBM system 3 (cpu, consoles, card reader/punch, line printer, tape drive, disk drive, cables, filing cabinets for cards, the whole shebang). Finally gave it away without it ever running. Too bad. Still it save a marriage, and that is well worth it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
