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Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

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Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#11

Post by emmelaich »

dbcurtis wrote: post #3

Those of us that were around in the days of mainframes and line printers remember that actually you sent 133 columns of characters to the printer, column 0 being the "carriage control" character. The most popular being blank, to advance one line, '1', to do a page eject a.k.a. top-of-form, and '+', overprint. The story that I heard is that the '+' character's over-strike behavior was a side-effect of logic minimizati…

Amazingly enough, there is still an echo of using that first char for control in the latest MacOS!

   man asa
In developertools at least. `asa` used to be the first command and manual page, alphabetically.

Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#12

Post by logfromblammo »

dbcurtis wrote: post #3

Those of us that were around in the days of mainframes and line printers remember that actually you sent 133 columns of characters to the printer, column 0 being the "carriage control" character. The most popular being blank, to advance one line, '1', to do a page eject a.k.a. top-of-form, and '+', overprint. The story that I heard is that the '+' character's over-strike behavior was a side-effect of logic minimizati…

The more things change, the more they stay the same. They installed a "pay us more money" switch. In hardware. The lingering scent of the unmitigated gall is still overpowering even years later.

Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#14

Post by kps »

emmelaich wrote: post #11
dbcurtis wrote: post #3

Those of us that were around in the days of mainframes and line printers remember that actually you sent 133 columns of characters to the printer, column 0 being the "carriage control" character. The most popular being blank, to advance one line, '1', to do a page eject a.k.a. top-of-form, and '+', overprint. The story that I heard is that the '+' character's over-strike behavior was a side-effect of logic minimizati…

Amazingly enough, there is still an echo of using that first char for control in the latest MacOS! man asa In developertools at least. `asa` used to be the first command and manual page, alphabetically.

IIRC ‘asa’ originates with System V.

Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#15

Post by skookumchuck »

acqq wrote: post #7

Read the notes, it's especially interesting: > in 1954, Remington Rand introduced the first high-speed drum printer, the "High Speed Off Line Printer System" for the UNIVAC computer. This printer produced 600 lines per minute at 130 characters per line. The printer used 18 kW of power and was cooled by 8 gallons per minute of chilled water. Wow.

It's a good thing we don't need listings anymore.

Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#18

Post by kens »

Animats wrote: post #9

Why the IBM 402 had 43 alphanumeric typebars: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION 0000000001111111111222222222233333333334444 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123

Is that real or an urban legend or somewhere in between?

Slightly tangentially, IBM often went by "International" back then. Products would have an "International" logo on them, and names like "International Automatic Carriage". e.g.: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#19

Post by jacobush »

gumby wrote: post #6

> the IBM 705 business computer rented for $43,000 a month (almost $400,000 in current dollars). But the IBM 1401 could be rented for $2500 per month, opening up the market to medium-sized businesses Amazing that we are basically back in that place again: renting computers or paying for computer time.

We are due for a back-lash soon. "On-premise cloud" or something.

Re: Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns

#20

Post by lucas_membrane »

dbcurtis wrote: post #3

Those of us that were around in the days of mainframes and line printers remember that actually you sent 133 columns of characters to the printer, column 0 being the "carriage control" character. The most popular being blank, to advance one line, '1', to do a page eject a.k.a. top-of-form, and '+', overprint. The story that I heard is that the '+' character's over-strike behavior was a side-effect of logic minimizati…

IDK. The wikipedia article on the 1403 does not mention any 1403A, just 1403N and 1 through 7. I doubt the overprinting was an accident, 'PUT SKIP (0);' worked for all the versions of PL/1 I used from 1970 through around 1990. Didn't even IBM use it for drawing maps and graphs on the 1403? I remember that the standard was to fill a region with O's to get a lightly shaded region, next darker was O overstruck with X, then O overstruck with V and A, and darkest of all, X + O + V + A all on the same print position.

The great story I heard about these printers but never verified is that there were 132 separate hammers, one for each print position 1-132. Thus, as the print chain spun around, each hammer fired when the correct character was in position for that hammer, and if you printed a line that matched the sequence of the characters on the chain, all the hammers would bang simultaneously, breaking the chain. Whether or not the sequence of the characters on the chain was a secret, IDK.

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