In the 1980s, at one of the first software jobs I had, I was seated for a summer next to the office line printer.

[charette@mstdn.ca]

In the 1980s, at one of the first software jobs I had, I was seated for a summer next to the office line printer.

A dot matrix printer would print maybe 9 vertical dots at a time, move the print head slightly, print the next set of dots, etc. A single character was composed of a matrix of 9 dots, thus the name.

A line printer was used in office settings. It would print an entire line at once instead of printing characters one tiny slice at a time. No print head to move on a line printer. But when the entire line prints, it sounded like a gun going off.

So when printing a page, it was like multiple guns going off per second, one loud bang per line. At at this office, people would regularly print documents with hundreds of pages.

Spent that summer wearing headphones listening to my Walkman.