1403 printers was: IBM's last tabulator last unitrecord punch card machine 479

Swapping

My first employer used a 48 char 1403 which handled the 1401 character set. However, we were under a S-360 and special characters of COBOL and things like parenthesis didn't print. The accountants wanted ( ) around negative amounts so they considered a 64 char chain.

They had gotten a lot of bad information initially--they were told (1) the new chain was very costly and the (2) extra characters would slow printing down by 20%. At first they refused to order one. Then they discovered the new chain was FREE (included in the maint contract) and the extra characters only appeared once and didn't slow the printer down. They got the new chain.

with (a a

I have rarely seen laser printers today that could approach the 6670 in terms of quality. A document from the 6670 really looked typewritten. I don't know if the speed, the laser, kind of paper (it used more typical office bond paper), but the output was very clean and crisp. Of course, a 6670 attached to a mainframe was quite expensive and required considerable setup programming. (We had to dig up our unused PL-I compiler it needed for some reason).