14 Jun
2006
14 Jun
'06
10:37 a.m.
At 07:19 AM 6/14/06 +0200, you wrote:
Chains could be (and were) made to order (more or less),
The chains in the ODEC printers weren't made to order. Well maybe they
were, depending on your definition of 'made to order'. The chains used in
the ODEC printers were basicly big rubber bands and each character was a
separate "slug" that clipped onto the band. The characters could be ordered
in sets and IIRC we also ordered individual characters*. We could install
complete character sets or just individual characters as needed.
*The slugs had a bad habit of breaking the clips that held them to the
belt and when they did the slugs shoot out like a bullet! The printer used
a metal proximatity sensor to count each slug as it went by and that's how
it knew when to fire the appropriate print hammer. But when it lost a slug,
all the following caharacters were shifted down by one and you got garbled
print. for example, if the "i" slug came off "The quick brown fox"
became
"The qujdl cspxo gpy"!
Joe
>This
question is not easy to answer.
>The IBM 1403 printer came in at least 2 versions : a 1000 lpm and a 300
lpm.
However,
the effective speed depended on what was being printed, as the
chains could be different. Typically, a chain had more E's then Y's, more
A's then P's, etc.
Interesting, The chain printers that I worked on all had the exact same
number of different characters. Depending on the number of characters in
the character set that was used on that partticular printer they usually
had 2 or 3 COMPLETE character sets.