golf-ball printer

golf-ball printer n.  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.