Where should the type information be 234

glen herrmannsfeldt characters.

Ouch!

However, the chain on an IBM 1403 was 240 characters long.

The chains used commonly where I used an IBM mainframe supported a character set of 48, 60, or 120 characters, so that every character in the supported character set repeated exactly 5, 4, or 2 times... except that they did not bother with the 48-character set chain. But this was at the computing center of a University, doing the print jobs of people doing academic computing.

However, there may well have been common chains supporting still smaller character sets for even faster print speeds; installations that printed huge amounts of bills or checks could well have used print trains that had the absolute minimum character set, say:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789 .,-

repeated as many times as possible; as this is 39 characters, one could repeat them 6 times, and still have room for six extra characters that could be repeated once. Maybe in the "real world", such a print train was indeed the most common one. Or something a bit less drastic, that repeated a character set with less than 48 characters five times so that a larger group of characters could repeat once.

John Savard