5 ms·

Had a dot matrix printer that used continuous paper. Notorious for jamming. Usually something getting stuck on the little holes, or the perforated sides tearing

• strictnein 9y ago
  One of my first "tech" jobs was refurbing dot matrix printers after we had them in the field for a while. The amount of little bits of that perforated paper that would get stuck in every moving part in one of those was kind of staggering. People were also really rough on those things. Yanking at the paper to tear it as the printer was just finishing it up.
• Moru 9y ago
  I had several dot matrix printers and can't remember any jams. And I did manage to accidentally dump the whole database to the one at work, the stack was at least 5 cm thick by the time we managed to stop it. It had it's own room though because of the sound so not your normal home printer...
• astrodust 9y ago
  The worst was when it lost traction, shredded the holes, usually in a tangle of paper. There'd also be cases where it kept pulling on the holes but those separated and got gummed up really badly. When you try and tug the pages out they're all perforated so you get, at best, a single page. It can be a lot of work to clear a jam. Most people think of dot matrix printers as slow, lumbering things that would take measurable time to print a single line. The industrial ones, enterprise grade, made by companies like IBM were dizzyingly fast, pages per minute, so if a jam happened it was usually severe. Most had multiple print heads to speed up printing. These also used much wider paper than normal for things like accounting reports. When they jammed, they jammed.