And of the same vintage, hands up who remembers "line printers" (hence the device name lpr). They had a row of solenoid driven hammers that would belt the pape

And of the same vintage, hands up who remembers "line printers" (hence the device name lpr). They had a row of solenoid driven hammers that would belt the paper+ribbon against a spinning drum or chain that was embossed with metal characters, typically 132 rows of 96 characters. The drums/chain spun very quickly. Big printers could print several thousand lines per minute (say a full page every 2 or 3 seconds, and much faster for empty pages.) They were Rather Loud - all those hammers belting a spinning metal drum several thousand times each second. A couple of tricks. Printers were not bolted to the floor. So imagine if all the hammers struck at the same time ... bang ... pause ... bang ... pause ... and the printer would increasingly wobble forwards and backwards, walking across its platform! The letters on the drum were staggered, so a row of "--------" wouldn't cause this, but rows of ABCDEFGH... would. They used fan-fold paper, and blank lines/pages could be ejected VERY quickly. There was a built-in a limit on pages/minute but if you produced the right (wrong) output, and someone left the printer lid open, the stream of paper would flow straight out of the printer and start to bunch up in the air! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer And a early one operating: https://youtu.be/FiEGoVzmyvs https://youtu.be/FiEGoVzmyvs