there were 88 printing characters (not quite enough for the entire EBCDIC or ASCII printing character set including the lower case alphabet) plus space and a few nonprinting control codes, more than can be represented with six data bits, so shift characters are used to allow the machine's entire character set to be used. This could cause a significant reduction in the print speed since printing "Armonk, New York, U.S." requires 10 shift characters resulting in a total of 32 characters transmitted to print 22 characters.

The machine was