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IBM Printer Hardware Technology

How the IBM 1403 Printer Hammered Out 1,100 Lines Per Minute (ieee.org) 174

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
schwit1 quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The IBM 1460, which went on sale in 1963, was an upgrade of the 1401 [which was one of the first transistorized computers ever sold commercially]. Twice as fast, with a 6-microsecond cycle time, it came with a high-speed 1403 Model 3 line printer. The 1403 printer was incredibly fast. It had five identical sets of 48 embossed metal characters like the kind you'd find on a typewriter, all connected together on a horizontal chain loop that revolved at 5.2 meters per second behind the face of a continuous ream of paper. Between the paper and the character chain was a strip of ink tape, again just like a typewriter's. But rather than pressing the character to the paper through the ink tape, the 1403 did it backward, pressing the paper against the high-speed character chain through the ink tape with the aid of tiny hammers. Over the years, IBM came out with eight models of the 1403. Some versions had 132 hammers, one for each printable column, and each was individually actuated with an electromagnet. When a character on the character chain aligned with a column that was supposed to contain that character, the electromagnetic hammer for that column would actuate, pounding the paper through the ink tape and into the character in 11 microseconds. With all 132 hammers actuating and the chain blasting along, the 1403 was stupendously noisy [...] The Model 3, which replaced the character chain with slugs sliding in a track driven by gears, took just 55 milliseconds to print a single line. When printing a subset of characters, its speed rose from 1,100 lines per minute to 1,400 lines per minute.
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How the IBM 1403 Printer Hammered Out 1,100 Lines Per Minute More

How the IBM 1403 Printer Hammered Out 1,100 Lines Per Minute

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  • Now? Not so much. A few good things here and there like Watson, but basically just a marketing company masquerading as a computer company.

  • I liked the dot-band technology (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:16AM (#54176501)

    A blend of band printer speed, with dot-matrix flexibility. The print stream could include a change of fonts, so a title or chapter could print in large, bold font, and the body in regular serif font.

    • Re:I liked the dot-band technology (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:31AM (#54176537)

      The 1403 was my first printer. Computers did not spend much time interpreting or summarizing data in those days, but focused on blazingly fast output to the endless stacks of greenbar paper the world ran on. People had to actually pore through those reams to find out what was going on. Even the developers had only hexadecimal printouts of main memory as a debugging tool. And you knew exactly what was in "core" too, because you had coded in Assembler.

      • Re:I liked the dot-band technology (Score:5, Funny)

        by fisted ( 2295862 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @06:15AM (#54176625)

        because you had coded in Assembler.

        I really miss those days. Nowadays, everybody just codes in Compiler. meh.

        • Get yourself an STM8 eval board from Ali Express for less than a buck, a STM stlinkv2 programmer dongle for less than 2, and have some fun.

        • Assembly is compiled. You are confusing it with Machine Language.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            I thought assembly was assembled, with the instructions corresponding directly to machine language. Feed x=2+2 through a compiler and you don't know what instructions would be executed. LDA #02 ADD #02 STA $02 would always assemble to the same machine code. The compiler can output code for a different architecture, the above 6502 assembly would need to be rewritten to run on a Z80.
            I'm not a programmer so maybe I misunderstand.

            • "Compiled" is usually taken to mean "translated from an abstract language". Assembly is a straight 1-to-1 translation. I never got particularly bent about people saying that they were "compiling" an assembly language program, though, and that's not even including assembly code heavily fortified with smart macros or so-called "optimizing assemblers".

              People have been known to implement cross-assembly macros or use virtual machines to run non-native machine language, but essentially, you're correct.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by lgw ( 121541 )

              There have been optimizing assemblers - reasonably common in the ancient days. That pretty much stopped as C became accepted for some low-level work, and assembler became about explicit control of the object code.

              But as a sibling post said: assembly labguage isn't just mnemonics for opcodes. It's a macro language as well, usually with the ability to use variable names, struct member names, and so on.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kolloid ( 1061496 )
        It was my first printer too. One of the first models of 1403 on a 1401. Around 1967. Before learning to program the machine I spent some time as operator. Our 1403 was not that fast. It printed 600 lpm with the "commercial" printchain, which only had upper case characters, numbers and a small number of special characters. There were fuller printchains, with lowercase letters and such which were also correspondingly slower because there were less repetitions of the character set along the chain, so a given c

        • Not too merciful on your ears but one gets accustomed to anything...

          WHAT???

          • Well, I spent 8 hours a day or more during a year working in the same room with the 1401, the card reader and the printer. After that time I was mercifully promoted to programming and that was on another floor. Sometimes I was standing just in front of the printer, checking if all went smoothly. Now I'm 75, and not much deafer than any of my friends my age :-)

        • Yes, line printers were horrendously noisy. Fortunately, the whole machine room was filled with the howling fans it took to keep a mainframe cool. Most of the printer noise disappeared into the background.

          • Actually, the 1403's were pretty noisy. But they were well soundproofed. You could definitely tell the difference when the cover was up.

      • What I recall about these printers was the ballistic sheet feed velocity. The paper was thrown out of it so fast that it was just sort of floaring down and landing in a pile more than being placed there by an guides.

        • That, and how when it ran out of paper the whole cover opened by itself like a giant mouth shouting "FEED ME PUNY MORTAL"

      • These were my first as well. We used them for regular greenbar printing, letters, envelopes, carbon forms, labels, junk mail. For non-greenbar forms we usually had to hack something together in the back to make the output stack evenly, otherwise it might backup inside and jam the printer. I still have my metal byte ruler from those days.

        It was great for letters since the output looked like it came from a typewriter.

      • Assembler is for pussies. You've never coded until you've twiddled bits.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        Even the developers had only hexadecimal printouts of main memory as a debugging tool. And you knew exactly what was in "core" too, because you had coded in Assembler.

        I started out using preprinted sheets on a pad for hand assembling and then entering the object code in hexadecimal manually into an EPROM programmer.

    • Re:I liked the dot-band technology (Score:4, Informative)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @07:51AM (#54177003) Homepage
      I l  ked dru    printe s bet er
         i        m         r     t

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TypefaceDrumPrinter1966.jpg

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer

  • Fan-fold Fan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by namgge ( 777284 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:27AM (#54176523)
    What I miss about the demise of these beasts is the the essentially unlimited supply of fan-fold paper that could be used for everything from drawing really long diagrams that went round all four walls of the office to making paper hats for kids' birthday parties. It had to be very high quality to avoid getting shredded as it flew through the printer. They were indeed v. noisy but anyone in the same room as them went deaf so the problem was sorta self-limiting. C.

    • Re:Fan-fold Fan (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:43AM (#54176557)

      I also had the pleasure of running a 5225 shuttle-matrix printer. Fairly fast, and quite noisy. Some of the actuators needed replacing at some point and the IBM CSR told me some interesting facts about the drive motor - the only one I remember is that it was about 1/2 horsepower, and you'd break your wrist if you used your hand to stop it turning. He left a 'dead' actuator behind for me to play with - I put a car battery's 12VDC across its terminals and it got very hot very quickly - I suppose the duty cycle was a few milliseconds on, then many milliseconds off, and it was designed to cool during the 'off' period.

    • The paper supply was not unlimited. If you were a student or other junior person, you got the job of fetching another heavy box of paper and loading it in the printer. (In my case it was a drum printer.)

      Forget about long diagrams. These printers were designed for printing tall grayscale posters using nothing but text to form the grayscale pixels.

      • Yes. My brother used to have a massive picture of the moon covering his bedroom wall. Four sheets wide and almost floor to ceiling.

    • Re:Fan-fold Fan (Score:4, Funny)

      by NeoMorphy ( 576507 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @09:55AM (#54177775)

      The paper was also good for printing out 6' posters of naked women! Does that count as EBCDIC art or ASCII art?

    • I remember submitting FORTRAN jobs that would spit out a string of page returns and watching the paper go several feet in the air. The guys in the white coats were not amused...

    • I did not know what the IBM number was, but we called them chain printers.

      I remember a guy with several big stacks of fan-fold print-out on a barrow, coming through an archway into a courtyard of Imperial College, London, on a windy day. As the wind hit him in the open, the paper un-fan-folded and rose up and to top of the 10-floor surrounding buildings and wrapped over the roof.

      In those days, if anything went wrong in a program run then, AFAIR by default, the mainframe did a core dump onto this paper. Yo

    • The boxes were very useful, also, once the paper had been printed and removed from them.. I've still got a few.

  • Testing, Testing (Score:5, Funny)

    by hughbar ( 579555 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:49AM (#54176573) Homepage
    I worked with ICL (now Fujitsu) printers of the same type and generation. One great console command we had was TE peripheral-number. If you used that on a printer, it would print a couple of pages of solid lines of characters, thus making a horrendous noise. So you waited until someone was beside the printer collecting printouts or starting to change the box of paper then let it rip.

    Computers provide less physical fun now that these printers, the tape drives and the blinking lights are gone. Happy days!

    • Re:Testing, Testing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @07:31AM (#54176911) Homepage

      I worked on ICL system 4 mainframes, we had a couple of these printers. A friend looked up the order of characters on the chain and printed a file with that on many lines. So all the hammers went forwards at once, then nothing, ... next line, all the hammers at once, ... He actually got the printer to rock forwards and back a little!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      We had a Dataproducts chain printer. At my first job, my office was directly across the hall from the printer room (which also served as the coffee room, but that's another story).

      That SOB was loud. I got pissed as hell whenever somebody left the cover open!!!

  • When men were real men... (Score:4, Funny)

    by linatux ( 63153 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:55AM (#54176583)

    Carriage Control tapes, massive static shocks, rotating printer ribbons to try and keep them running true.
    The good old days!

  • this printout is from an IBM 1403 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ei4anb ( 625481 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:56AM (#54176585)
    I found an old printout among some old maths books. Our school was close to the NUIG university engineering building and the professor had invited our maths class to learn how to program the IBM 1800 computer. This was one of my first programs. http://2eo.blogspot.ie/2014/04... [blogspot.ie]

  • video (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fattmatt ( 1042156 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @06:40AM (#54176699)

    Here is a video of one in action ... built like a tank...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • 1403 Made IBM What it Once Was (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It has been speculated that this printer was the primary reason IBM was so successful selling the 14xx line and the IBM 360+ line. By far the best (speed, quality, reliability) printer of its time, it carried the actual computers with it. Alas, that great IBM is no more....

  • line printer noise as music (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    well, not quite music, but when we printed checks, forms, or similar material -- where every page was identical in terms of where you needed to print something, then the cadence of the sound would tell us -- from way outside the computer room -- what specific print job was running.

    amazing stuff...

  • Tally-Genicom printers that can do 1500 lines. I used a lower model years back to crank out mailing labels. It was beautiful.

  • Ah, the old line printers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fnj ( 64210 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @07:54AM (#54177021)

    I remember my first post-university job in 1972 at Alpha Industries, a microwave house. They took me on to work with an HP 8542A automatic microwave network analyzer on which they invested a quarter of a million. It was 3-4 full height relay racks of equipment including the excellent HP 2100A mini, which had as I recall a full staggering 16K of magnetic core RAM, and an impressive set of peripherals including a 300 cps high speed optical paper tape reader, high speed paper tape punch, a huge heavy-duty ASR-35 TTY ... ... and ... a gigantic CDC 300 lpm rotary drum line printer built like a Sherman tank, the make and model I can't recall. It was cowled with sound absorbent structures, but when you raised the top of that baby to revel in watching it print, the deafening staccato noise was enough to put a boiler factory to shame. When it printed out a long line of dashes, there was a crash like the crack of doom as all the hammers came down at the same instant.

    Everything was on preventive maintenance with an HP specialist. As I remember it, the mini was phenomenally reliable, mostly just burned out indicator lights, but all the peripherals broke down all the time. We called the tape reader the "tape render", the tape punch the "tape pinch". Except for the ASR-35. It was night and day to the shitty light duty model 33 which the hoi polloi didn't know any better than to stick themselves with. That model 35 just soldiered on. Somebody broke the glass window once or twice leaning on it, and the type box shed a key once every few years (and the type box was swapped out in about 30 seconds), but other than that it was NEVER down.

    The microwave test equipment and the HPIB connecting it all was actually quite reliable.

    I had pretty much free reign in my own spacious air-conditioned room. I shared with an assistant production and development testing duties for the product line on the network analyzer, but the fun part was, I got to write customized test programs in FORTRAN and HP BASIC.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      They would also set fire to the small fragments of paper that inevitably gathered in the housing if left unattended. Vacuuming out the printers was a daily activity when I had to work with them. Both fortunately (for noise) and unfortunately, they stood in foam-lined fiberglass shells which gathered even more paper chads. Not only did these have to be removed for cleaning, they had to be cleaned themselves.

  • Good grief man! Microseconds sounds a little bit to fast to be mechanical, even if they worked in parallel. ? Are you sure it was not milliseconds? Sounds more like a rail gun speed. And even they don't last long. https://www.quora.com/How-plau... [quora.com]

  • IBM Printer Excitement (Score:3)

    by BoRegardless ( 721219 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @08:26AM (#54177165)

    At least once, my program in Fortran, which had many IF/THEN loops, had an unfortunate page feed loop.

    I can attest to how high the paper flew out of the old IBM printer and how fast a box of paper was emptied. It happened before you could react to stop it.

    • A broken carriage control tape could do it too. Inside rapidly fills with billowing paper followed by the 1403 cover automatically rising. :(

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      At least once, my program in Fortran, which had many IF/THEN loops, had an unfortunate page feed loop.

      I can attest to how high the paper flew out of the old IBM printer and how fast a box of paper was emptied. It happened before you could react to stop it.

      So one of my customers had a few old line printers and used them daily to generate reams of reports (that no one really read, but momentum so...) I was in the data center one day setting up an external disk array when I hear one of them fire up and someone yell out. Look back and there is a guy standing there with both hands over his face. Turns out he was trying to do something with the printer when a report fired out. He had the cover open and the printer starting firing paper straight up at his face and

  • I don't remember the model (or even manufacturer) but it could print faster than other printers could form-feed.

  • Ah, yes! The only text printer I ever ran that you had to wear PPE (personal protection equipment) to operate! It was like a chainsaw with type instead of cutting teeth...

    • The IBM CEs who worked in our data center had to wear ties and white shirts. I think I only saw them using clip-on ties though. Otherwise some of those 1403s would have claimed a victim. Those printers needed a lot of maintenance.

  • I don't recall exactly what model it was, but about 15 years ago when I worked for IBM, the customer I managed had a whooooole lot of IBM printers connected to their maintrame terminals. I remember the support desk used to get the odd call where the printer jammed mid printing and it would burn the paper, not a full on fire but scorched ostensibly from all the friction. Although this was rare, they often needed a service call afterwards so it was kind of an expensive paper jam.

  • I'm old enough to remember a time when some teachers refused to accept term papers printed on a dot-matrix printer because, you know, appearances are more important than the quality of the prose. So, a buddy of mine and I found this nifty gadget called a Dynatyper which was a box filled with solenoid plungers. You mounted this thing on top of the keyboard of an electric typewriter. You typed your paper into the computer, edited to your hearts' content, checked your spelling (because no spell checkers in

  • Yes I remember printing on band printer in college. I remember printing lines of underlines with a no CR (what was that, a "+" ?) :) noisy suckers.

  • What did a 1403 cost? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rrkaiser ( 676130 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @10:29AM (#54178079)
    $25,000 for one printer. Or, as we said in those days. Five Cadillacs.

    Authority? I overheard it in our raised floor, freezing cold, glass windows in walls computer room.

  • Is seeing the number of posters bearing 5-digit and low 6-digit slashdot ID numbers.

  • FTA: "Some versions had 132 hammers, one for each printable column, and each was individually actuated with an electromagnet."

    Wonder what kind of RF noise that created. Don't imagine they shielded much back then...

  • Bigly Reports, the ol' days (Score:3)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @11:48AM (#54178893) Journal

    In retrospect, it's amazing how much paper the web saves. At the end of an accounting or "reporting" period, say approximately a month depending on the org, giant reports would be printed up with a hierarchical breakdown of whatever was being tracked, sometimes a foot thick. Often multiple copies were printed for different managers and executives. End-of-period report printing resembled a news-paper operation.

    The reports allowed managers to see the roll-up of high-level statistics, medium-level statistics, all the way down to "detail" lines with specific transactions, objects, or events per line. It was a simple hierarchy, averaging around say 4 levels, so they were pretty easy for managers to relate to. Trees are bees' knees. (Of course there were always odd domain-specific caveats to deal with, or marketing inventing odd hybrid categories for purposes explained with PHB buzzwords if you asked. But these goofy exceptions are job security.)

    And the same info was often printed in at least two ways: by location (such as sales stores and regions), and another report by a category hierarchy, such as product category, somewhat like Amazon's drop-down category menu, but usually with more levels. This allowed managers to compare categories and their changes (trends) to each other.

    Often semi-summary and summary versions were also printed, without the detail lines. Some variations compared to several older periods, to monitor longer trends. Of course, these didn't take up nearly as much paper.

    Assuming you got clean data and the right tools, these mega-hierarchy reports were fairly straight-forward to program. (Older orgs often had convoluted data sources or structures and needed a lot of data cleaning and adjusting to make it report-able.)

    The web-based interactive versions of the same thing are not always so straight-forward, in part because being online gives you more options, such as query-by-example (match criteria) instead of just a hierarchy. They often end up being hybrids between hierarchies and query-by-example, making them potentially more confusing and thus need more feedback and tuning to make them easy for managers to use.

    I tend to make such too "meta", with factored abstractions that allows the same concept to bend to multiple needs. But these often confuse users and thus I often have to dumb them down, adding redundancy to make it easier for users to mentally digest. They have to see specifics from their domain, or they wig out.

    Less "computer operators" are now needed to manage the online equivalent of the printers and report distribution, but more programmers and DBA's are needed to tune the UI's and databases for interactive reporting.

    This reflects a general trend of our economy of more engineering and less "operators" babysitting machines such as command consoles, printers, and physical report distribution. There are fewer "middle-men" between the technology and user, but the flip side is the technology has to be more sophisticated to compensate for lack of intermediaries to help the end-user get their info. The middle is being hollowed out.

    But, the web certainly saves paper. Younger managers almost never print out thick hierarchical reports: they expect it to all be online (and exportable to spreadsheets so they can fiddle with it on their own).

  • The First Hardware I fell in Love With (Score:3)

    by CAOgdin ( 984672 ) on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @12:00PM (#54179041)

    My paean to the IBM 1403, with which I've spent many loving days and nights:

    The clunky printer attached to the IBM 709 "mainframe" computer was a slow, lumbering monster. But the practice, in the day, was to use the smaller (only $250,000) IBM 1401 computer to load decks of program/data punched cards onto tape, the tape "mounted on the IBM 709" "mainframe" for execution, then the program's output to be written to tape (our 709 had 8--later 12--729 tape drives), and carried back to the IBM 1401 for printing of results. A "job ticket" specified which card decks went to tape, and which tapes would then be sent to the IBM 1403 attached to the 1401. And, that was the marvel: It could print several hundred pages in just a few minutes, often as graphs composed of asterisks, dashes, and other symbols, representing the points on the axes and the data points computed. Crude graphs, to be sure, but very effective to show non-technical executives. All in marvelous black (or blue) on white paper

    The 1403 was the star of the show. Nobody much cared about the support task of copying boxes of punched cards to tape. They loved watching the lights on the huge "front desk" of the 709, the source of most TV footage of "a computer at work," in the day. But, they loved the speed, efficiency, quality, and distinctive (but relative quiet of the closed-box printer cabinetry) sound of that 1403. It meant we had results to see! Those of us who moved beyond FORTRAN (the preferred language on the big 709) found the 1401 computer a delight to program, with a memory structure of variable-length words with a "word mark" bit to distinguish the end of a string of characters...an architecture I'd love to see revived.

    But, the 1403 was the workhorse of the business, and its' star performer. When results of huge warfare simulation models, or Linear Programming model forecasts of macroeconomic possibilities, often with foot-high stacks of large, wide pages emerged from the back of the 1403...faster than one could read them...everyone looked for the "macro trends" of big areas of ink (or barren spans of white), they gave insight into the likely success or failure of the most recent changes in the models...and, occasionally presaged teentsy bugs that had created hugely errant results.

    Given the technology of the day (the laser was yet to be invented) all these technologies in the emergent era of modern computers were marvels, and the IBM 1403 was the most effective tool of them all. Without that ability to produce massive reams of output for later analysis by mathematicians and programmers, and executives, and analysts, we'd've never made the subsequent leaps that have led to the cellphones we have today.

    ANECDOTE: True Side-Story about the masses of blinking lights on the 709. We were hard by the Pentagon, and contractors used our "service bureau" at C-E-I-R for doing warfare modelling. Most programmers cleverly used control over some of the 709's console lights to indicate progress, or other information. At $800/hour (in the 1960's) it was important to know of the results were likely to be good or bad, so we could quickly terminate the latter to save money. One fellow was building naval warfare simulation models, considering different weapons and tactics to maximize the achievement of battle outcomes, and he used one bank of lights to indicate which kinds of targets were being destroyed in the simulated battle. One day, I'm watching the lights flickering at a decent rate, when the programmer in charge of building and testing the model was watching those lights blinking, and suddenly, leapt out of his chair, reaching for the "kill" button, exclaiming, at the top of his lungs, "The Damned Thing's Attacking CARGO Ships!!!", as he pressed the button to reset the computer! No 1403 output from THAT job. :-)

  • A remarkable triumph of design and engineering. Pushing so much speed out of relatively simple mechanics and electronics was quite a feat.

    Nowadays a good laser printer can print faster; 30 pages per minute is the equivalent of about 1,800 lines per minute. And that's only a midrange printer; a really high end printer can do double or more that speed. But it's not impressive in the same way, just as a TGV going 200 miles per hour doesn't have the same visceral impact as a steam engine going 100 miles per hou

  • In those days, a misbehaving job would usually involve a memory dump being made of the program in error. No core files, it would all go to dead tree in a mixture of hex and ebcdic. It was down to you to look at the binary to tray and work out what went wrong. Most compiler/linkers were good about giving you the memory addresses of your data areas though.
  • I got lucky and got a student job in the computer repair group in college (NERDC?) It was during the last few years of punch cards / hammer printers and the beginning of PC labs.

    One of our jobs was to repair the 132 pin printers. There were 132 individual hammers that could be individually replaced / tuned. We'd get a report that some of the columns were light or had some other problems. We'd go in and first try tuning the hammer impact strength by slightly bending the hammers. I can't remember it we

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