Golf ball printer
<printer> The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The "golf ball" was a little spherical frob bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four parallels of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different golf ball.
This was the technology that enabled
APL to use a non-
EBCDIC, non-
ASCII, and in fact completely non-standard
character set.
This put it 10 years ahead of its time - where it stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20, until character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support other character sets.
