Dot Matrix

In the long forgotten era of Disco and retro fashion victims that was the 70’s to the mid 80’s, this was the most common, and the noisiest printer around. A typical day at the office print room would be spent screaming at co workers half the time for the day’s gossip over the din of the dot matrix printers.

These printers have a print head that possess rows of pins, 48 in all, forming a grid, or matrix, if you will. Paper is fed into the roller and an inked ribbon, akin to those found on the old manual Underwood of the pre-computing age, is spooled in front of the print head. At the same time, a combination of pins are pushed forward in response to a signal from a computer which then marks the paper with a series of dots that would eventually form letters or an rough image. These types of printers are pretty useful when printing text in large volumes.

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