Talk:IBM 1403

IBM 1403 PRINTER
The 1403 was so fast at ejecting paper, that it had a motor-driven assembly at the rear just to pull the paper away. If you were unlucky enough to have a bug in your program, instructing the printer to eject to top-of-forms (TOF) in continuous succession, you could find yourself having gone through an entire box of listing paper (some 2000 sheets) in a matter of seconds.
 * The other common error (among operators, of course) was to put the control tape loop in backwards, such that the TOF-punch was on the wrong edge of the tape. The first time skip-to-TOF command came through, the printer would spew out the entire box of paper.  The take-up mechanism couldn't quite handle this, and the paper tended to pile up behind the printer instead of in the basket.  RossPatterson 20:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

A communications cable linked the printer to the Printer-Attach - a system sub-unit the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet. This cable was as thick as a man's arm and had a large clamp at the end to hold it in place. It was nicknamed 'the elephant's trunk' for that is just what it resembled.

The printer was fitted with an acoustic hood and soundproofing to all side panels. If the hood was open when the printer was in use, the noise was ear-piercing. You certainly couldn't have talked over the noise.
 * There were several models, including those like the picture in the article which only had the top-hood and those that were fully enclosed. If you valued your hearing, you got the latter (1403-N1). RossPatterson 20:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

The printer could be doubled in speed by replacing the usual uppercase/lowercase print-band with one which contained uppercase letters only. With two sets of uppercase characters it halved the time required for the characters on the rotating band to become aligned with the print hammers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.47.93.248 (talk • contribs) 03:45, 19 February 2006


 * The uppercase only print chain was the standard. Very few 1403s were shipped with the mixed-case chain. So the option was to accept lower-speed printing than normal in exchange for being able to print lowercase. Most "data processing" shops had very little use for a mixed-case printer, since practically all of the input data came from keypunches and they had only upper case, so there was practically no text stored that was in mixed case. Heck, most computers prior to the PDP-11 and the System/360 represented characters internally with six bits and had no room for the lowercase alphabet. Jeh (talk) 16:58, 26 October 2017 (UTC)


 * "an entire box of listing paper (some 2000 sheets) in a matter of seconds" is a gross exaggeration. The 1403 had a slew rate of 75 ips. Pages were 11 inches tall, so that's about 7 pages per minute. A box of 2000 pages would therefore take almost 300 seconds, about 5 minutes, to empty. "A matter of seconds" suggests more like five or ten seconds to most people. Jeh (talk) 07:14, 31 December 2017 (UTC)


 * I think you meant 7 pages per second. 2000 pages × 11 inches per page ÷ 75 inches per second = just under 300 seconds.  With no acoustic cover, an IBM 1403 can slew paper so fast that it looks like a fountain over the printer.  You can get a nasty paper cut at 75 inches per second, so nobody wanted to go near it.  Safest is to wait until the paper supply runs out.  John Sauter (talk) 21:46, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

1403 rememberances
I first became a computer operator in 1968 and worked in a shop with a 360/40 and a 1403. The previous post left out 2 "endearing" features of the 1403.

The first was the paper stacker. The paper was pulled up from a box in the front of the printer, through the print area and over the top and into the stacker. There was a flat floor for the paper and the back was made of chromed wire to hold the paper in and allow you to reach through and fix some folding problems. The back folded down so you could get the stack of paper out. The paper came through a bar thing with rollers, brushes, and chains (to get rid of static) that you could move up or down. The endearing part of it was that quite often it did not work. The printer could easily produce over 20 pages a minute so if you were doing something else you could come back in 10 minutes and find a huge mass of paper spilling out the back onto the floor.

The second thing was the top. Later models were a large completely enclosed box to keep the sound down.§ In the front there was a glass door for the paper box and glass panels to see the print train. The top was huge and probably would have been hard to lift so they put in a motor. At the push of a button the whole top would rise so that you could feed paper. There were 2 pairs of tractor feeds and between them the print area. This was a rather large thing that held the two ribbon rollers that continued to spool the ribbon between them. The ends of the ribbon had a metal bar attached to it and there was a lever that stuck up so that when you got to the end of the ribbon the lever was hit and the ribbon would reverse direction. Occasionally the metal bar would get caught, the ribbon would stop moving and the printer would cut through it. Behind the ribbon was the print train and the stuff to make it spin. You unlatched this whole thing and swung it away to put paper in. Now, you were printing along and when the end of the paper passed through the bottom tractor it opened a sensor and the printer stopped printing and raised it's top so you could feed it. At least once during your career you put something on top of the printer, a cup of coffee or a box of paper, and, when it ran out of paper it would dump it on the floor.

The company might buy the printer but never the print train. The printer did not come with a print train that was a separate part. Many shops had multiple trains because the speed of printing depended on how many times a character appeared on the train. You could get 1000 lines per minute out of a simple chain with only upper case letters and numbers. If you needed to print upper and lower case the speed would drop because a character would only appear half as often. The reason you rented the train was that it would break. The train was about 4 inches wide and 20 long. The characters were on slugs. Each slug had 3 characters on the front and teeth on the back. The slugs fit in a slot that ran around the train. At each end there was a toothed wheel to make the turn. One wheel was driven and that was what moved the characters around. Now, you have all this stuff moving around at a fairly high rate of speed and sooner or later a little too much dirt and lint from the ribbon will build up and the train will stop abruptly. At this point the IBM CE will be called in to fix it. In those days everybody at IBM was a professional and had to dress like one. The poor guy who fixed the machines wore a suit, white shirt, and tie. I quite often felt bad for the guy wrestling with some dirty piece of equipment in his nice white shirt. So, this guy would take off his jacket, roll up the sleeves of his white shirt, tuck in his tie, and take each slug out of the train and clean it in alcohol with a toothbrush. He had to be careful with the slugs to not mix them up and over the period of a few hours he would have all the slugs cleaned and layed out ready to be put back. Now put all the pieces back in the right order and make sure it moves good. Put the train back in the printer. When you closed the gate the train would start up so he would close and then open the gate as quickly as possible so the train would spin just a little to get it loosened up. After a few of these the moment of truth when he closed the gate and spun it up. About half the time you got the horrible thunk that meant you had to rip it apart again. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by P7willm (talk • contribs) 15:25, 22 March 2007 (UTC).

Lifespan
Does anyone know when IBM stopped selling the 1403? Riordanmr (talk) 17:59, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

According to IBM, The last 1403 was delivered in 1983.Deadduck1 (talk) 08:31, 18 August 2017 (UTC)Steve

1403 remembrances
How well I remember this beast, owned 2 channel attached mod 3's on a 360/30 that supported production operations for about a decade before replacing the system with a 4341 & 4245 band printers (etc.etc.). Another piece of trivia: the 1403's servos were hydraulic, took about two gallons of IBM hydraulic fluid to change it's oil. Learned real fast the real procedure to clean the trains, it wasn't disassembling them. And if you used IBM's train cleaner, that foamy continuous feed crap IBM sold you, your print trains turned into junk. To clarify: The two character set T trains/chains (uppercase & lowercase) were the slowest. The fifteen character set N trains/chains were the fastest but were numeric with six symbols each set only. The five character set A trains/chains were the fastest alphanumeric, and the A/N set followed closely behind, depending on what you printed. The difference was double or slightly better than double on some model 1403's but only for the N sets, not for the A or A/N sets. Deadduck1 (talk) 07:55, 18 August 2017 (UTC)Steve

Confusion between 1401 and 1403
The article currently says "When it was first introduced, the printer leased for $6500 per month (equivalent to $54,000 in 2017) and IBM received 3000 orders in the first month." However, the reference says that the *1401* received 3000 orders and cost $6500 a month, not the 1403. The rental price for the 1403 was actually $775 a month. Source: A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems (BRL), 1961. (By the way, $6500 is kind of a high price for a 1401 rental, and must have included some tape drives. The 1401 system was famously designed to rent for under $2500 a month and it succeeded, with a base price of $2475. A recommended system was $4610 a month. (Source: BRL)) KenShirriff (talk) 18:06, 7 December 2017 (UTC)


 * You make good points. Can we find another source to confirm either? I don't have time to check my hardcopy stuff now but I'll come back to this this evening. (However, you probably have a more extensive library than I do.) Jeh (talk) 18:16, 7 December 2017 (UTC)