On Sat, 2025-02-15 at 13:38 -0700, ben via cctalk wrote: > > > 6 bit characters were fine if you didn't care about proper > > capitalization and your only language was English.
An Icelandic chain could be gotten for an IBM 1403. I reverse engineered a program that converted numbers to Icelandic words, for check printing. So I added an Icelandic encoding to my Autocoder cross assembler. The Computer History Museum has a 1401 that was originally German — so it needs 50hz power. AFAIK, they didn't get a German chain that included umlauts. The usual 1403 setuip on a 1401 was to use a 47- character chain, but it was possible to get 63-character chains that included box-drawing characters. Those kinds of chains were used to print the Automated Logic Diagrams, or ALDs. Maybe IBM offered chains for Germany and France with more than 47 characters, to have all the accents. But they would print slower. IBM also offered a 15-character chain that had only digits plus five other characters — minus sign, dollar sign, comma, decimal, asterisk — for printing numeric-only reports. It was much faster than the 47-character chain. Of course, all the chains had the same number of links (I don't remember how many), but more repetitions with smaller character sets.
