Epic Win: Dot Matrix Printer Paper
Submitted by Jeremiah G
Dot Matrix Printer Paper is more of an epic fail because of all the times we had to reprint our papers because we accidentally ripped the page, but at the time of it’s invention it was a drastic improvement to all of it’s alternatives. Remember when you first got your Dot Matrix Printer and you didn’t have to hand-write or type out your paper anymore? Then when you managed to tear the pages apart and rip the dot matrix strips off of the side, you could make springy things by folding them.
The springy thingys you could make were the beat thing about it!!
Totally.
I worked at the computer help desk at the University of Florida in the late 80’s – we had a bank of printers behind the counter, and when users printed something they had to come to us to claim it. The default printer was a Printronix 132-column belt printer – it used 11×17 green/white bar paper – we printed thousands of pages a day! I made springy things that were 10 feet long one shift
hah, my grandpa had stacks and stacks of the 11×17 green/white bar paper. they made the best paper airplanes.
Hey, that’s the high tech stuff, compared to the punch cards I had to mess with.
I was just a wee one when these were about so my friends and I would just draw epicly long pictures and maps on them. (And then get yelled at for wasting good computer paper!)
same here!
One of my best friends in elementary school used to give me stacks of this stuff. Her dad worked at a paper mill.
I still have a few stacks of my favorite goldenrod coloered variety.
We had them in kindergarden.
Result: Mile-long paintings and “playing mummy”.
I have a box filled with this paper in the basement! We use it when the little cousins come over and want to draw.
Sorry to be pedantic, but this is not dot matrix paper – this is tractor feed paper.
Tractor feed is the paper with the sprocket holes down the edge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractor_feed.
Dot matrix printing is the process of printing with a grid of dots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-matrix_printer.
Thank you! Beat me to it…
Especially since there were impact printers that used much the same paper. The impact printers were fun to watch, too. Imagine an old electric typewriter running at about 200wpm and you get the idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_printer#Obsolete_and_special-purpose_printing_technologies
Tractor feed allowed forms alignment so the computer could fill in the blanks on preprinted forms. Friction feed would continuously slip and lose alignment or print on the perforation. The programmer could keep track of the text being placed on the page with software, or the line printer could warn the computer that it was at the bottom of the page and have the program issue a skip to top of page, print a new page header, and continue printing. It was the paper feed mechanism for high speed line and page printing that could print 600-3000 lines per minute (10-30 pages per minute) with impact or laser printers. The characters would sequence, like a train, through a track in a cartridge at high speed. A hammer would strike the back of the paper, pushing it into a ribbon and print the character when it was in the right place. It could print through 5 part paper (5 pages and 4 sheets of carbon paper). I spent years putting a new box of paper in a printer every 2 hours. The 2 standard sizes were 11×8.5 and 11×14.
These are still in use by some hauliers, still the fastest way to print off 5 carbon copies of a delivery note and keep them together.
… and there were also dot-matrix printers that used cut-sheets just like today’s inkjets.
Not to be even more pedantic, but perhaps the original intent was “dot matrix printer” paper rather than “dot matrix” printer paper.
Where’s our droid-of-honor? Dot? Dot Matrix?
(I loved those springy things, too. You had to put the holes of the paper on the point of a pencil to get em really good.)
The sad thing about this is there are still boxes of this paper in my basement. And yes, those springy things were awesome.
The really sad thing is that the accounting department at my law firm still uses this crap, so I have to tear edges off every month for the billing!! Ugh!!
Oh, dang that is really sad. Well, at least you have the springy things to play with?
They made great cat toys, too.
One of my doc’s still uses this paper, and I just made one of the springy things for cat the other day. He loved it!! The doc’s office I work at just got rid of our dot matrix printer about a year ago.
We still use this at work! Its amazing the fun you can have on a night shift with all the junk we get telex’d to us…
We still use this, too. We print out stacks of reports a couple inches high every day, and have to store them forever, too! I’m so glad the rest of our instruments use inkjet or laser printers.
You mean this stuff still EXISTS?!
We still use it at my office too, for three different printers! It’s a royal pain when they get jammed though…
I loved making banners out of this stuff. The old Corel Draw and other graphics software used to have options to turn this paper into big messages of HAPPY BIRTHDAY or CONGRATULATIONS!
Yes!
i worked in a hospital dietian office in the late 90’s early 2000’s and they still had this printer. nothing worse then when working a t 6am after a late night out hearing that printer go off for half an hour! then having to go thru a mile of print out and tear off the right begining of the floors. ugg.
My dad worked at HP back in the 70s and 80s, and he’d bring home boxes full of the green bar paper that had all kinds of weird code printed on the side with the bars. I used to enjoy:
A. Putting it on the linoleum and rubbing it with a crayon to get the texture of the floor pattern to come through.
B. Making tons of clothes for my space princess paper dolls.
Good times right there…
I still have copies of high school reports that were printed on the tractor-feed stuff. I *hated* aligning that stupid stuff in the printer. Not to mention that I was a champion procrastinator and my mom hated me printing my reports the night before they were due… usually at around 12:30 in the morning…
“…but at the time of IT’S invention it was a drastic improvement to all of IT’S alternatives.”
Lordy, Lordy. Let’s run through this very slowly and simply.
it’s = “it is” ; contraction, pronoun + linking verb ; used to tell what a previously named thing is doing
its ; possessive adjective ; used to show that the following word belongs to the subject
IT’S NOT FRIGGIN’ ROCKET SCIENCE, IT’S MORE LIKE FOURTH GRADE GRAMMAR. Look, I just used it correctly twice. If you’re still so remedial as to not have learned it already, here’s an example: “The dog wagged its tail. It’s very happy.”
Same rule applies to “your”/”you’re.” That is all.
I love you forever!
Bless you, Wyde. Is there any way this message could be broadcast to the entire English-speaking portion of the human race?
Here’s a pet peeves of mine: misuse of healthful/healthy. This misuse is common even to Prevention Magazine and Reader’s Digest. Only live entities can be healthy, such as, “That is a healthy cow walking by us” or “This plant is green, growing and healthy-looking.” Non-living things or activities can be healthful, such as, “Drinking skim milk is healthful” or “Running a mile every day is healthful.” You cannot eat a “healthy breakfast” unless you’re eating something while it is alive. You can, however, eat a “healthful breakfast.” **Sillywhiskers steps off grammar soapbox.**
I hate the every day/everyday thing. For one, “everyday” is incorrect all on its own. It should be hyphenated. But it drives me up the wall when even professional signs say, “Save more everyday!” UUUUGGHHHH
I’m glad I’m not the only one driven crazy by this. You don’t write hi’s or her’s either.
But you can have he’s or she’s.
It’s even worse when professional publications, advertisements, etc. make this mistake.
What if “IT’S” stood for Information Technicians? I think IT fits…
While we’re being pedantic: ‘its’.
Thank you! That drives me nuts, too…
I agree that the sproingy things were awesome.
“Remember when you first got your Dot Matrix Printer and you didn’t have to hand-write or type out your paper anymore?”
Unless the printer didn’t go to pot in printing papers for classes and I had to do that anyway. Or pay about 25c a page to get it done on a laser printer.
My parents would buy huge boxes because they were cheaper than other paper, and me and my sisters would have to peel all the sides off. It took forever, but we got a penny a page
I remember having tons of that paper, and drawing on it when i was 8 or 9 years old..
The torn off edges of the paper were more fun than straw wrappers =D
I remember that the print quality always s*cked in those days. The letters were thin and tiny. I was relieved when laser printers showed up.
That chit was awesome!
Okay, someone’s gotta get it.
Well, never mind. Comment fail. I meant chad. It’s not as funny when it’s called chad instead of chit.
I was too young to care about printing, I remember this as “paper I’m allowed to color on” and rip the sides off of to make springs. Sometimes I’d color the sides before ripping them off, then make springs and lace them on string. Wore ‘em like a necklace!
i used to do the same thing
we’ve still got loads of this stuff laying about the basement.
Fond memories of Kindergarten. I always tried to make “glasses” by looking through the holes in the torn-off strips. They never worked very well
I still have boxes of this stuff, I just doodle on it.
We had one of these, and it brought us much annoyance. Firstly, it never deposited the paper in a neat pile, but folded it however it felt like at the moment. Secondly, the only paper available was American standard, and we don’t live in the states. Every few pages we had to recalibrate the printer so that it didn’t attempt writing on the “wrong” page.
But yeah, very nice overall.
dot printer paper = love.
My mom has not only the paper but an actual, functioning dot matrix printer, despite the nice ink jet I talked her into. She won’t get rid of dot matrix because she thinks it is a good back-up printer!
We still use these at my work to print DMV related documents. And they have CARBON PAPER. Bet you didn’t know that still existed. (At least that’s what the customers tell me.)
Oh, I totally loved the tracker paper with the carbon. We had a big box in the basement, and I’d pull it apart just to get the sheets of carbon for various projects.
Yeah. I remember dot-matrix printers. Actually, I still had my last one up until a year or so ago, when I moved. I’m not sure if it still worked, Microsoft quit making drivers for it around Windows 2000 or so.
They were great, if a bit persnickety. Oh, and noisy. My roommates hated me when I was in college. Those things printed at about 1 or 2 pages per minute, tops (at report quality, draft was a wee bit faster). So, a 20 to 30 page report would take the better part of a quarter hour to print, usually late at night. Griiiiiind, hiss, wump, griiiiiiind, hisss, wump, griiiiind hiss wump.
I have no nostalgia for Dot Matrix printers. The paper always jammed in my old one.
i still work with this paper… my place of business hasn’t been upgraded in a while…
Ahh fond memories, about half of my IT lessons at school would be spent arguing with the printer over whether it wanted to print in the first place and the second half making springies with the holes!
We have a HUGE one of the printers where I work now for the daily reports, unfortunately the paper isn’t perforated along the sides, just imagine the springs you could make with all that.
Also used to make great colouring paper, I would use the holes as templates for perfect little circles!
I remember when I was a kid, my dad would help me print streamer on that paper. No need to glue any sheet together, there where all ready together.
The springy things were SO awesome. And I echo the comment above about using Print Shop to make giant posters with these. Ah, Print Shop…whatever became of that? I made many greeting cards with it.
Print Shop was rad! All the templates for banners and birthday cards . . . super early versions of Clip Art . . . the “special” yellow paper that was included . . . good times.
I hated printing with dot matrix printers though – would always run over the tear line or jam without warning.
LOL! My family had a business where my brother and cousins and I all had to play with office supplies while the grown-ups were working. I remember making total outfits for dress-up out of the edges with the holes, after tearing it all off at the perforation.
Made a great tiara.
My mom was a computer operator & her company used this paper. The carbon paper was the best since you got 3 colors to play with. I would fold 2 of them together to make a rope like thing. Her office also had a separator that would remove the carbon paper & separate 2 sheets. That thing was scary! I wish we had filmed it in operation.
We had a dot matrix printer at my work until October last year…the horrendous noise it would make….eeeeeeeee….eeeeeeeee…eeeeeeeeee….and the paper would get off track and I would have to print everything over….
The first time I saw this stuff was as a little kid at my grandmas for summer break. She’d pull up the old print shop software and show us how to make banners to color in on the rainy days. When she died a few years back I helped clean out her house and I found a case of the stuff. I gave it to my eight year old, who thought it was the best thing since chocolate pop tarts. He spreads it out on the floor and make “police chalk drawings” and stuff.
Not only do we still use these printers where I work but when a couple of them finally crapped out the owner insisted our manager buy the same kind. He had to call some place that refurbishes them and get more. Our telephones are even older than these printers!
When I was little, I didn’t make springs often, but instead my sister and I used to rip them up into pieces and use them as “tickets”.
“a drastic improvement to all of it’s alternatives”? I don’t think so… can you say daisy wheel? …although, I guess those printers used the same paper. But still, daisy wheel printers were awesome… sounded like machine-gun fire whenever you went to print something.
I was little when those printers were in use. The printers where my father worked would often print out extra pages after each document and of course they couldn’t be reloaded in to the machine so he brought them home for me and my brother to draw on. Its largely because of dot matrix printers that I am an artist today.
where i work we use these things, too
My Dad just gave us a huge box of, like, 8 reams of tractor feed paper that he found when he cleaned out his classroom (he’s retired). What he expected us to do with it, I have no idea. So we gave it to the kids to use as drawing/paper airplane/whatever paper and they adore it. It seems like such a bizarre relic from the past and they can’t get enough of those foolish springs.
It kind of reminds me of how I used to get given old punch cards to play with back in the 80’s.
ours still works. at home. but then my dad was a IBM CE so if it breaks, he can fix it. saddly, I learned how to do battle with tractor feeds, daisy wheel and dot matrix printers. I the poor college student in 1999 had to take the beasty daisy wheel tractor fed dot matrix with me. in an emergancy I could use it to bust out my dorm window for an escape.
Walmart still uses them for printing reports and crap. some how I get run to when the stupid thing gets out of alignment so they don’t have to call NCR. which is scary in itself that they have to call NCR to “fix it”.
I like both the tractor feed paper and the dot matrix printer. I always thought every dot matrix printer had tractor feed. Anyways, it was purely a toy for me. I never had to deal with it getting jammed because daddy would always fix it. Of course we made things out of the paper edges and used them as a cat toy. We also had a stationary program (print shop?) that would make banners that my mom would print out for us to color. It would keep us out of her hair for awhile.
I LOVED the sound the printer would make! It would not be unusual for my dad to be printing after I was put to bed. I would fall asleep to the sound. The sound also meant that he was still in the basement and I wasn’t alone with the furnace.