Joe R. wrote: 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. IIRC there were 196 positions per belt and the characters sets that we normalled used were either 64 char/set or 96 char/set. Burroughs had a number of different character sets available for the printers but in 2+ years that I worked for them I don't recall ever seeing any used except those two. Joe I also recall a numeric-only version, which could do up ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Billy: Most of the trains and even some of the drums CDC supplied had an uneven distribution of characters based on their frequency in normal use. Part of this analysis is not intuitive; for example more 1's than any of the other numbers. The main reason for this was performance. But almost as important was reliability. Frequently used characters wore out faster. Adding extras and distributing them evenly extended the life of the train. I still remember my first experience trying to troubleshoot a train printer that printed only Greek. A week later, I was sent to work on one that only printed Hebrew. This time I was smart enough to have an English train flown in before I arrived. There were finally more than 50 trains in the catalog. One was even all numbers and special characters for one of the AEC sites. I saw one in a publisher's site that had been modified to print multiple characters in one space, so they could include proof reading characters on the galleys they sent to the printer. I never saw it but always wanted to get the one that had a full range of mathematical symbols. Now we take for granted any special font and mix them freely. Some things DO get better. Billy