Re: In the early days...
"...receipts are always printed with thermal printers"
Exactly right about no ribbon to replace. Some customers would let the things wear so much they'd start shredding (and the printers were fiddlly to load)
The other reason for moving away from inked ribbons was maintenance:
I started my working career servicing POS systems (in those days, that was mainly just "electronic cash registers") and as the apprentice one of the regular jobs was to take the printer mechanism out and give it a liberal dousing of isopropanol spray whilst having it print with no ribbon and going over it with a toothbrush until the liquid stopped running purple.
A secondary amusing part of having to do that was that isopropanol has "other uses" in the illegal drugs industry (mainly oil extraction from cannabis), so anyone buying significant quantities of it (and acetone - used to strip resist from PCBs amongst other things) was "of interest to the authorities" no matter how innocent the actual purchase reasons.
You don't want to get either on your skin for any period of time (or breathe the fumes), but elfin safety rules weren't nearly as comprehensive back then so we simply weren't told about the risks.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
