Completed in August 1960, the FACOM 521 was Fuji Tsushinki Manufacturing Corporation (currently Fujitsu) first commercial high-speed printer to use the type drum system (Note). The company's early printers employed the type bar system, but the bars were fairly heavy and were raised and lowered discontinuously. And thus the limit on printing speed was about 100 lines per minute. On the other hand, there was a need for a printing speed of a few hundred or a few thousand lines per minute due to the improved performance of computers. In accordance with this need, Fuji Tsushinki Manufacturing Co. developed the type drum system as a new system. After a few rounds of prototyping, in 1960 they completed the FACOM 521 high-speed printer with a printing speed of 500 lines per minute. Subsequently they added various improvements and developed the FACOM 641 which increased printing speed to 800 lines per minute.
(Note) In the beginning, it was called the "type wheel system" or "type ring system". Its type drum was constructed by stacking 60 type rings which had 2 digits each , to build up 120 digits.
| FACOM 521 | FACOM 641 | |
|---|---|---|
| Completion date | August 1960 | March 1964 |
| Printing system | Type drum system (type wheel system) | |
| Printing speed | 50 character types 500 line/min 100 character types 300 line/min |
50 character types 800 line/min 100 character types 460 line/min |
| Character types | 50 character types (*1): Numerals (10),Alphabetic letters (26),Symbols (13),Space (1) 100 character types: Numerals (10),Alphabetic letters (26),Symbols (15),Space (1),Blank (1),Katakana (47) |
|
| Number of printed characters | 120 char/line | |
| Connected systems | FACOM 222P,FACOM 222A | FACOM 222A,FACOM 241, FACOM 231 |
*1: Equipped with 2 character sets for high-speed printing.
