One of my jobs in the late 70s was printing junk mail on these printers.
The outfit I worked for had apparently bought an IBM 370 system along
with the printers, punchcard readers and reel-to-reel tape storage for
pennies at auction. A room with 6 of these printers going is very loud;
should have been wearing earplugs but none of us did. Mostly we printed
offers for insurance and credit cards on pre-printed fan-fold forms; only
the text that varied -- names, addresses, terms of offer -- were printed
so getting things to line up was sometimes tricky. We went through a
lot of ribbons with these printers; usually they broke before all the dry
ink was worn off. Other times the forms would tear. In both cases the
tapes would have to be wound back a bit and the job restarted. Many of
the forms varied only slightly from eachother; the worst thing one could
do was run the entire print job on the wrong forms..

LOL -- think I still have my IBM printer smock from that place.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 07.08.2022 17:38, Dan Espen wrote:

My memories are pretty clear.
I can't recall a shop with 120 character printers and I was in a LOT of shops.

I spent 2 years in a 1440 shop. The 1443 printer was 144 or 120
characters. Never saw one of those with 120 characters either.

From the Wikipedia, IBM 1403 printer (for IBM 360 and other systems):

The IBM 1403 has the following models:

Model 1: 100 print positions, maximum of 600 lines per minute, or
1285 with the Numerical Print Special Feature.
Model 2: 132 print positions, maximum of 600 lines per minute, or
1285 with the Numerical Print Special Feature, or 750 with Universal
Character Set.
Model 3: 132 print positions, maximum of 1100 lines per minute, or
1400 with the Preferred or Universal Character Sets.
Model 4: 100 print positions, maximum of 465 lines per minute.
Model 5: 132 print positions, maximum of 465 lines per minute.
Model 6: 120 print positions, maximum of 340 lines per minute, single-carriage.
Model 7: 120 print positions, maximum of 600 lines per minute, single-carriage.

Obviously there's 100, 120, and 132 columns, it seems - the latter
(132) was what I remember to have been used in our computing centers
(that had been running CDC 175, Siemens 7.x (IBM clone, with HW from
Asia, IIRC), and TR 440, all with the same sort of chain-printers).

Janis

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)