The printhead was driven by a stepper motor and the paper was advanced by a noisy solenoid ratchet drive. It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 7×5 dot matrix characters across a unique-sized paper. The DECwriter LA30 was a 30 character per second dot matrix printing terminal introduced in 1970 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts LA12: a portable terminal - the DECwriter Correspondent.LA120: 180 CPS (and some advanced features).LA34: a lower-cost alternative to the LA36.

LA36 (1974): supported upper and lower case, with up to 132 columns of text (also 30 CPS).Unlike the LA30's 80-column, uppercase-only 5x7 dot matrix, DEC's product line grew. Their LA30 30 character/second (CPS) dot matrix printer, the first of many, was introduced in 1970.īy the dawn of the 1990s, inkjet printers became more common as PC printers.

Introduced in 1970, it led to the design of the parallel electrical interface that was to become standard on most printers until it was displaced well over two decades later by the Universal Serial Bus ( USB).ĭigital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was another major vendor, albeit with a focus on use with their PDP minicomputer line. The first impact dot matrix printer was the Centronics 101. In the 1970s and 1980s, dot matrix impact printers were generally considered the best combination of cost and versatility, and until the 1990s were by far the most common form of printer used with personal and home computers.

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