15 Feb
2025
15 Feb
'25
2:58 p.m.
On Sat, 2025-02-15 at 13:38 -0700, ben via cctalk wrote:
> 6 bit characters were fine if you didn't care about proper
> capitalization and your only language was English.
An Icelandic chain could be gotten for an IBM 1403. I reverse
engineered a program that converted numbers to Icelandic words, for
check printing. So I added an Icelandic encoding to my Autocoder cross
assembler.
The Computer History Museum has a 1401 that was originally German — so
it needs 50hz power. AFAIK, they didn't get a German chain that
included umlauts. The usual 1403 setuip on a 1401 was to use a 47-
character chain, but it was possible to get 63-character chains that
included box-drawing characters. Those kinds of chains were used to
print the Automated Logic Diagrams, or ALDs. Maybe IBM offered chains
for Germany and France with more than 47 characters, to have all the
accents. But they would print slower. IBM also offered a 15-character
chain that had only digits plus five other characters — minus sign,
dollar sign, comma, decimal, asterisk — for printing numeric-only
reports. It was much faster than the 47-character chain. Of course, all
the chains had the same number of links (I don't remember how many),
but more repetitions with smaller character sets.