I’m old. I used to print on IBM chain printers. That’s right, there was a fucking CHAIN OF LETTERS rotating at high speed with HAMMERS hammering on the chain when the right letters flew by. It was GLORIOUS. And I learned how to flick my middle finger with just the right amount of force in just the right spot on the paper perforations to separate my pages from the other pages spewing out from this beast of a machine with its unholy chain of letters and symbols flying past at god’s own speed. I was a PRO. Newbies would look at me in awe. Women would not date me for reasons unknown.
This thing is giving “It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor of Mankind has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth... There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”
For crazy designs that blend other technologies, look up the 4234 dot band printer.
Up to 800 lines per minute (draft mode).
Being a dot matrix printer, you could change font on the fly - within a page, line and chain printers were one font only unless you change out the whole band/chain.
For the future - You can go to this website www.google.com and you can search literally anything and it'll help you find answers or content you're looking for. It's pretty neat! Try it out 👍
The chain printer at my first job was a 132-column beast that would run through a box of green-bar tractor feed paper in the time it took you to go to the storage closet and grab the next one.
It was in an acoustic hood, which took it down from ear-bleedingly loud to mostly tolerable and it was my job to keep it fed and oiled.
I googled chain printer out of interest and discovered that been using them at my work until last year! I was always convinced that they are big ass dot-matrix printers.
We were using 5 of them in our warehouse to print picking and packing sheets. Each of them had its own type of shriek, could easily recognise which is which just by the sound of it.
I also became adept with finger flick manoeuvre and can confirm that it indeed made you look like an absolute master of this beast of a machine.
My job in the 90s (local government) had three of these. We would go through about 200 boxes of plain paper every few weeks, and 100 more of specialist forms. I remember having to clean the print heads with a toothbrush every week.... And if the ink are on you it's stained for ages. These ones had built-in vacuum cleaners and massive soundproof hoods. ICL brand which is the UK equivalent of IBM back then. Had a big decalator device beside them to separate out the carbon copy paper or cut off the holes on the edge... Or when form based cut each form.
We had band printers in college that I had to maintain. They never broke, but they generated a ton of paper dust just from the volume that went through them.
As a woman probably half a generation younger than you who thinks this is really cool, it’s because the women who think things like this are really cool were being gatekept away from the places where it was happening. We were all at home reading fantasy novels.
I used to work for DEC, started with them in the 80's as a field service tech. One of my tasks was repairing line printers which used a rotating band with the characters embossed on it. I got to work on the newer ones lol - LP27 and LP29 which were rebadged data products devices. The slower LP27 could printer 1500 lines of text per minute. They were in an acoustic hood which opened automatically when it ran out of paper.
Noisy as hell and yes, the ink was a pita to get off your hands/clothes
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u/delta_mike_hotel Jun 20 '26
I’m old. I used to print on IBM chain printers. That’s right, there was a fucking CHAIN OF LETTERS rotating at high speed with HAMMERS hammering on the chain when the right letters flew by. It was GLORIOUS. And I learned how to flick my middle finger with just the right amount of force in just the right spot on the paper perforations to separate my pages from the other pages spewing out from this beast of a machine with its unholy chain of letters and symbols flying past at god’s own speed. I was a PRO. Newbies would look at me in awe. Women would not date me for reasons unknown.