We fixed the vintage IBM printer at the Computer History Museum yesterday. Introduced in 1959, the IBM 1403 line printer provided fast, high-quality output, printing 132 character lines. Unfortunately, one column stopped printing, so we disassembled the printer to fix a bad hammer. Keep reading...
@kenshirriff There is a legend that night operators would sleep on the printers, only to awaken when the printer opened as the paper ran out, rolling them off the lid to signal it was time to reload.
@robpike @kenshirriff I once sent the wrong, much larger, file to one of those, and in the seconds it took me to run to the printer room to stop it, it had printed a stack of fanfold a foot thick.
@rrmutt @kenshirriff If the file had formfeed characters, the 1403 could empty a box at seemingly supersonic speeds.
Ken Shirriff
rob pike
rrmutt
Rod