About Green Bar Printout
Fan-fold line-printer stock, 14-7/8 by 11 inches, white bond with pale green bands printed every half inch and tractor holes punched down both edges. An IBM 1403 chain printer struck 132 columns of Gothic capitals across it at ten characters per inch. The bars were not decoration — they kept a reader's eye on the correct row of a payroll run.
The system inherits that logic literally. Everything sits in one fixed pitch, left-flush, snapped to a character cell. Bars lock to whole line counts, never to arbitrary pixel heights. Nothing is rounded, nothing floats, nothing glows. The page is paper that has been hit, and the ink is grey-black and uneven.
- Origin
- Global — corporate and university data centres
- Era
- 1950s–1990s; peak batch-report era mid-1970s
- Key figures
- IBM · Moore Business Forms · Wallace Computer Services
- Movements
- Batch computing · COBOL business reporting · Continuous-forms stationery
Green Bar Printout design spec
Colors
Typography
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