IBM 1403-2 Line Printer

On the left of the photograph is a line printer.
On the floor is a box of fan folded blank paper.
At each fold it is perforated so it can be split into pages.
Each page is 11" (279.4mm) deep and 15 ¹ /₄" (387.35mm) wide.
If a full box of paper was laid out flat it
would be almost 559 metre long, over half a Km!
At each edge of the paper were sprocket holes
that engaged with teeth inside the printer
that controlled the movement of the paper.
After the printing it was fed out of the
rear of the printer into a pile,
that if you were lucky was neatly folded,
but too often was not and had to be manually tidied.

The 1403-2 printer used a Chain Printing Mechanism (See later),
and had a rated speed of 600 lines per minute.
It could print at either 6 or 8 lines per inch (25.4mm),
and each line could contain 132 characters
printed at 10 characters per inch.

The information about the printer came from the
IBM Systems Reference Library manual entitled
IBM 1403 Printer Component Description
that is in the collection.