1403 Printer Carriage Control
Very preliminary !! - with the assistance of Frank King :-))Wikipedia has a very short article, with reference to the IBM 407 and IBM 1403
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_control_tape
Along with the expensive 1403 printer you got:
- Excellent print quality
- A two speed slew, for higher printer through-put. If the channel being slewed to
was more than 8 lines away,
the printer went into high speed slew (75 inches/second)
and would start slowing down to 33 inches/second
when within 8 lines away from the desired channel hole. )
( This baby can really throw paper !! )
Here are a few comments about the 1403 line printer Carriage_control_tape system
- The Carriage Control tapes were frequently made of (tough) mylar rather than (more fragile) paper. The mylar seemed to have an aluminum foil imbedded in it (for additional dimensional stability?) ( At least that was my experience at G.E. )
- The length of the tape loop was made with the same number of sprocket holes as the number of lines of the printer paper form (or if loop too short, a multiple of the lines of the printer paper form)
- The ends of the loop were typically glued with a tough red glue. If using tough mylar, that tough red glue was the only point of tape failure.
- Customarily, the channel 1 hole indicated top of form
- The printer operator was responsible for aligning the top of paper form with the hole in channel 1
- When the programmer wanted to position the print paper so the next line would be printed at the top line of the form, a command "slew to channel 1" was issued to the printer.
- Other interesting lines of the form would have separate "channels". Possibilities included: Customer name, Dollar amount, Comments, ...
- If the programmer slewed to a channel that didn't have a hole, the printer would slew until manually stopped or out-of-paper. (Big excitement, typically, the top of form - channel 1 - also had all other channels punched to avoid this excitement.)
Pictures and text from pages 12 and 13 of IBM-1403_Manual_A24-3073.pdf IBM 1403 Printer Component Description
 Page 12 |  Page 13 |
Page started March 17, 2014