The IBM 557 Alphabetic Interpreter allowed holes in punched cards to be interpreted and the punched card characters printed on any row or column, selected by a control panel. Introduced in 1954, the machine was a synchronous system where brushes would glide over a hole in a punched card and contact a brass roller thereby setting up part of a character code.

The 557 was a maintenance headache. In reality it was 60 little printers. The sequence was as follows:

The 557 was prone to jamming of the lifter bars and resulted in what the CEs called a "rack and wheel" job. This meant stripping the machine down to its base and rebuilding it, an eight-hour job.