1403 printers was: IBM's last tabulator last unitrecord punch card machine 483
 |
Hi, Sam...long time no hear.
Allodoxaphobia existed An The big design point of the 1403 printer (S-360 history by Pugh et al) was that veritical misalignments were very noticeable while horizontal were not. I always...
H'mmm...I dug up an ancient user's guide from my PPOE (this copy from several years after I left) and found the GN character set listing:
SNIP I can't answer when the last IBM tabulator rolled off of the production line, but I do remember that the company where I started and trained as a computer programmer in...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
This is a 65-glyph address space which won't divide evenly into 240, so it would have probably had four non-identical sequences of characters, meaning that print speed was a function of the text being printed.
The biggest problem with swapping the trains was teaching a new student operator how to align the train and the drive gear so that the printer knew where the first slug was. (You cranked the train until the digit "1" on the marked slug was adjacent to an engraved arrow, then cranked the driving gear around until a screw head was visible through a (badly oil-stained) window and the gear tooth was next to a cutout. You then installed the train (wiggling the slugs a bit with your fingers, snapped down the locks, reinstalled the ribbon, and started cussing because you discover that your shirt brushed up against the carriage and now has ink stains...
That wouldn't be too unusual. There was a standard (RPQ?) option under which customers could order subsbreastute slugs (either standard from the sales manual, or custom-cast) for a train.
Joe Morris