Chain printer

Paper transport through a chain printer

The chain printer is a printing device used in IT , which was used in the mainframe area in particular in the 1970s and 1980s . The printing process was developed at IBM Germany at the end of 1957 .

construction

A rapidly rotating chain with printed types is guided over a ribbon . The ribbon is usually designed in the form of a colored cloth in order to cope with the high mechanical loads. At each printing position there is a hammer mechanism that is actuated by an electromagnet. The individual hammer mills strike exactly when the desired character of the type chain passes the printing position. It is printed on continuous paper .

The printing speed and the number of copies that can be used are very high. Devices that could print pages every second were already in use in the 1970s and 1980s. Even today (as of 2005) there are still many chain printers in use for mass printing, especially in logistics . The high speed is achieved in that the printable characters on the type of chain (the 7-bit standard usually only ASCII - character set ) are partly present more than once, so that in a row characters to be printed not only sequentially, but within certain limits can be printed at the same time.

This special feature also explains why chain printers are also referred to as line printers . Bold print and semi-graphic print could be achieved by multiple overprinting using ASCII control characters. An example of a chain printer is the IBM 3203.

A successor to the chain printer is the steel band printer, in which the types are stamped into a steel band. Examples of this type of printer are the IBM 4245 and IBM 6262.

Web links

Image ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) of a chain printer from Control Data
IBM 3203 manual

Individual evidence

↑ Patent DE1145405 : chain printer for data processing machines. Registered on December 24, 1957 , published on March 14, 1963 , applicant: IBM Deutschland GmbH, inventor: Frederick Murray Demer, Alex Thomas Shalkey, Richard Henry Harrington. ‌
↑ Rolf Klaus and Hans Käser: Basics of Computertechnik , vdf Hochschulverlag, 1998, ISBN 978-3728124753 , p. 170 [1]

[patDE1145405-1] Patent DE1145405 : chain printer for data processing machines. Registered on December 24, 1957 , published on March 14, 1963 , applicant: IBM Deutschland GmbH, inventor: Frederick Murray Demer, Alex Thomas Shalkey, Richard Henry Harrington. ‌

[2] Rolf Klaus and Hans Käser: Basics of Computertechnik , vdf Hochschulverlag, 1998, ISBN 978-3728124753 , p. 170 [1]