The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That 3884

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 17:36:31 +0000 (UTC), Joe Morris

If you start with *five* copies, you're already limited to the 48-character set.

But most of the "48-character" subsets I've seen really only have 47 characters - unlike the 60-character and 120-character versions, they don't take advantage of the fact that you don't need a slug for a space. So one has a *start*.

With an uppercase-only character set, if one had five repebreastions of a 44-character subset, one would have room, then, for 20 additional characters. That would let one have the full PN print train, plus four other characters - perhaps cent sign, exclamation mark, and open and close square brackets, for example.

But what would the 44-character subset be?

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789 .,$*-

are, I suppose, the 41 *absolutely essential* characters. Why is asterisk so important?

Well, that's the $***4,096.00 question.

those in the ususal "48-character" subset.

Although it's quite a speed penalty for printouts that use even such common characters as :, ;, (, and ), it might indeed work for commercial shops.

The other possibilities I examined in a post did not seem to lead to much in the way of speed increases; their only benefit seemed to be saving the time needed to change the print train.

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