Line printers
BTW line printers were really awesome for doing charatcer based artwork on.. If you could handle the noise.
Now consider the guy servicing these beasts, and doing hammer flight time adjustment. You could not always rely on the service kit containing hearing protection.
I've worked (occasionally) on belt and drum printers, never seen a chain printer AFAICR. For really torturing them you had a text file that had the characters on a line arranged so that the hammers would fire all at once. This had a fair chance of blowing the fuses or even the power supply itself after a few pages.
As a student I found myself in the possession of a HP drum printer one day. The fact that the drum had rings of characters for only one in three character positions quite baffled me initially, until I figured out that the paper transport could move sideways. So, left, print, middle, print, right, print, line feed, print, middle, print, left, print, line feed, and so on. Apparently saving 88 hammers (now 44 instead of 132) and hammer drivers made up for the additional mechanics.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
