The History Behind the Definition of a 'String'

My assumption has always been that the programming term originated from the following definition of the word "string" (from Merriam-Webster):

(1): a series of things arranged in or as if in a line <a string of cars> <a string of names>

(2): a sequence of like items (as bits, characters, or words)

Since a string in programming is simply an ordered sequence of characters, referring to this as a "string of characters" (or simply "string") seems like the most probable origin.

From this reference:

The 1971 OED (p. 3097) quotes an 1891 Century Dictionary on a source in the Milwaukee Sentinel of 11 Jan. 1898 (section 3, p. 1) to the effect that this is a compositor's term. Printers would paste up the text that they had generated in a long strip of characters. (Presumably, they were paid by the foot, not by the word!) The quote says that it was not unusual for compositors to create more than 1500 (characters?) per hour.

From searching through the ACM bibliography it seems the word string acquired its meaning in computer science during the 1960s. At the beginning a string is a general kind of sequence or list, e.g. A command language for handling strings of symbols from 1958.

This article explicitly mentions "character strings" in 1964.

Unfortunately I can't access the full texts, which are behind a toll booth.

I suspect it's because string originally meant just a sequence of data values: "I'll just string these together" etc. These values didn't have to be characters. One very common use for this general concept happened to be a sequence of characters, and this took over as the general meaning of the word.

The word was originally used to differentiate between a set of values to which the particular order of elements doesn't matter (for instance, a set of random samples of measurements) and another that could only have its meaning preserved when the order is also preserved. Originally a string could be a set of any kind of values, but since in the post-mainframe era a string of characters is by far the most common kind, the fact that the values are characters became a "default".

In a talk about Javascript history Douglas Crockford says "Nobody knows" and gives a few alternatives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO1Wnu-xKoY#t=2989

I found the report which in it, allegedly, there is the first reference ever in computer history to a series of characters as a "string". I think it's at the top right column of page 4 of the pdf, which is numbered 47:

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Naure_Algol60.pdf

It's called a strings, because it's actually an array of char type elements.

That being said, they are "stringing together" (or is it strung together) via this array, which turns them into a "string".