Dot Matrix

by AdamStanislav - uploaded on February 11, 2022, 4:07 am

Back in the 1980s, dot-matrix printers revolutionized output from computers to paper. They allowed to scale fonts to any size, and print them as a series of dots. Originally, a dot was either printed or not printed, it was either black or whatever color the paper was.

In the US, printer manufacturers were competing in fitting as many dots in an inch of paper (not necessarily at the same resolution horizontally and vertically), from which the DPI (dots per inch) unit was born, much to the annoyance of the entire rest of the world, which had long been using the metric system and so people generally had no idea how big an inch is (and don’t to this day).