On 05/26/2016 12:33 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
On 2016-May-25, at 6:14 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
On 05/25/2016 05:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> From: Jon Elson
>> I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service
>> bureau machine; it had (IIRC) ... a 4301 printer.
> I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?
Ah, right you are! The old grey cells are, well, old! ;-)
Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new System 3
they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?
I believe IBM recycled them from retired machines for an amazing length of
time. Certainly, a number of 1403s were in use on 370 and even later systems.
I was recently surprised while digging at bitsavers to find out how ancient the
2821 controller was - all SMS cards and some very ingenious magnetic
transformer tricks to do the address selection of the core stack with as few
transistors as possible. (The 2821 was the controller for the card read/punch
as well as the 1403 printer family.)
A 1403 was in use at UBC for undergrad batch services up till the end of that
service in 1979/80.
I used to get a kick out of pushing the button to raise the cabinet shroud. The
big shroud would rattle and shake as the motor-chain drive raised it to expose
the print mechanism, all while it continued to print, and the noise level would
go up by some tens of db.
At least I presume it was a 1403, it looked like just like this:
http://ibm-1401.info/1403Cable-PP-04-.jpg
Yes, that would be the 1403-N1, the top of the line. 1100
LPM, and had the motorized cover and totally enclosed
cabinet, for noise suppression. The cover also raised
automatically whenever the printer had a check, mostly for
out of paper. That could happen in barely 15 minutes or so
when printing less-dense output.
Jon
