IBM 1403
More info
- Creator
- IBM
- Released
- 1959
- Type
- Line printer
The 1959 chain printer that set the industry's benchmark for print quality and stayed in machine rooms for twenty years.
Announced alongside the IBM 1401, it worked from a horizontal chain of cast type slugs running past a bank of hammers. The base model managed 600 lines per minute, later variants a little over 1100. What made it legendary was not the speed but the impression: characters landed straight and evenly black in a way competitors never quite matched, and customers were still citing it as the standard well into the 1980s.
The chain sat in a swappable cartridge, so a site could change character sets in minutes — handy for forms that needed odd symbols. The machine also became an unofficial musical instrument: because hammer strikes could be timed precisely, programmers wrote routines that made it play recognisable tunes. IBM is not on record as having encouraged this.