12 Feb
2021
12 Feb
'21
12:43 a.m.
I've heard stories about a very high speed dot matrix printer used (IIRC) at Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory. Apparently, it used a bank of Hydrogen Thyratrons to multiplex high
voltage onto a set of metal needles. The resulting sparks burned tiny black holes into
the paper at 24K LPM.
It occurs to me that it could probably have been used for graphics, typesetting, and such,
but I dunno. Might anyone here be able to talk about (or provide links about) this
beast?
-r