The Internet, Circa 1981

[Tallpine]

Funny, I still see dot matrix printers at a few businesses, predominately (maybe exclusively) for receipt printing. I didn't even know you could still buy the fanfold paper for them, let alone the printers themselves.

I still remember having my printer stand setup with the paper feeding from behind it, via a Costco (Price Club at the time!) sized box of paper.

I still use a perfectly good 24pin printer for accounting reports and financial statements, which is about all that I ever print.

I have a couple boxes of fanfold paper for it, and I can get ribbons online.

It was quite a fine printer when I bought it ~1995 - mainly to be able to print multi-part forms.

In 1981 I didn't even have a phone (you couldn't get one up where we lived back then). 

[230RN]

When I had my electronics surplus store, I'd get a lot of used DM printers in and I found I could refurbish the ribbons by cracking open the tops of the ribbon cassettes and judiciously squirting a little WD-40 into them.

I'd let them sit for a while to let the WD-40 distribute itself evenly and they worked fine. Sometimes I'd run the ribbon back and forth a few times to hasten this process.*

I did this because customers always wanted to see the printers "work," and I was darned if I was going to buy a new ribbon for every used printer I sold just for demo purposes.

Yes, I'd advise them that it was a "rejuvenated" ribbon.

Too much WD-40, though, and the printouts would become sloppy.

I also found that on many printers where the pins had become jammed from dirt, paper fiber, whatnot (which is why people got rid of them, thinking they were "broken"), the small amount of WD-40 in the rejuvenated ribbons themselves cleaned up the print heads and they worked fine.

That WD-40 magic was a highly profitable discovery on my part.

Terry

* I wrote a quickie program to repetitively print out a line of blanks CHR$(32) without a line feed CHR$(10), but with a carriage return CHR$(13) so the ribbon would keep advancing.  I'd let that run for a while to distribute the WD-40 better.

Most of the time, with most printers and most ribbons, that worked well, but sometimes it didn't.   

[RoadKingLarry]

We still use dot matrix printers for printing off our circuit orders and engineering details, connected through the old legacy 3270 network. A couple of the offices I work at still use big high speed, wide format, tractor feed line printers for that job. They are gradually being replaced with ethernet connected "network" printers, usually a higher end Xerox or Brother.

[230RN]

....

[Ben]

I can't remember for sure anymore since it was back in the stone age, but I think the NX-10 was my first printer (I definitely had the NX-10, just can't remember if I had one before it).

[Perd Hapley]

At work, we use a DM tractor-feed printer for customers' orders. They've been using an old Okidata, and every time they've tried to replace it, the new printer has quickly broken down, and they've had to replace it with the old, beige monster. We just now acquired a new Okidata, which people seem quite impressed with. Slightly faster, and much sharper printing, but still noisy and clattery.

[Tallpine]

At work, we use a DM tractor-feed printer for customers' orders. They've been using an old Okidata, and every time they've tried to replace it, the new printer has quickly broken down, and they've had to replace it with the old, beige monster. We just now acquired a new Okidata, which people seem quite impressed with. Slightly faster, and much sharper printing, but still noisy and clattery.

First computer place I ever worked (before I "went native" little knowing I would come back to that sort of thing thirty years later...) had multiple alphanumeric character sets running on a chain at some ungodly rpm. (almost like a chainsaw, "cutting" sideways)

The computer printer activated the desired little hammers inside the running chain-typeset at just the right time, and the result was that it could print an entire line of text in what sounded like one blow.

This was long before the "Green" days and we went through huge amounts of paper.  One of my main jobs was maintaning the forms storeroom and keeping the right paper next to the printer for what needed to be done.