An Improvement in the Art of Chain Printing

On my page at

where I discuss the a small fragment of the history of the punched card, I also digress into noting IBM's 48-character, 60-character, and 120-character character sets for printing.

And that got me to disclosing an idea I had for making one kind of computer line printer do something one never expected a computer line printer to do. Well, at least not before the Xerox 9700 came along.

Since in chain printers, the letters move *across* the page, one could imagine putting them in nonstandard positions by firing the hammers at the wrong time.

Let's take that idea further.

I propose that by using two rows on the chain, and some fancy buffering and processing, one could, *from a mechanical line printer* yet, produce... proportionally-spaced text.

Could you imagine the "1403 Executive" from IBM?

Also, I've added a drawing of the Univac 9400 front panel at

as I had been planning to add something by Univac before I settled for HP and DEC as a way to relieve IBM's dominance of that page.

Thinking of the Univac 9200 and 9300... I wish I could recall the particulars of a story about a king who dressed up a little dog to look like the king of a rival kingdom. That is what, however unjustly, reading of a 9300 serving as a peripheral to a 418 made me think of.

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