1403 printers was: IBM's last tabulator last unitrecord punch card machine 484

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 hated documents printed on other computer printers where the characters danced all over the page. Even our brand new Univac in 1978 had that trouble*. IBM printed documents were always very crisp-looking.

However, a script font obviously requires tight spacing or the connectors between each letter won't match. I'm surprised they went for such a thing. Unless this was in the very early 1960s under a 1401, I'm surprised they didn't do their soliciting with a mag-tape Selectric typewriter which was coming out in the 1960s. While not as fast and requiring an operator, it produced high quality letters. (I had do a run of that once--I went through a hand written address list, typed the heading and Dear Mr-Ms**-Dr based on context, then pushed a button and the stored text followed.)

**They told me to use Ms. if I couldn't tell if it was Miss or Mrs.

*They tried using the Univac printer to make nice directories. They put in a lowercase chain and a carbon film ribbon. Despite that, it still came out looking lousy--the letters just weren't fully formed, and the carbon film actually made it look worse.