I used to work for a company that had a band printer. The characters were on a metal band like that in a band saw with duplicates of the letters around the band. The printer would spin that band around and make an imprint. It was incredibly fast and incredibly noisy. The printer had to be in a noise dampening enclosure.
IBM mainframes in the 70's invariably came with the IBM 1403 high-speed band printer, which pretty much represented the apex of band-printing technology. They printed 132 column, 66 line pages of EBCDIC text at a few seconds per page (depending on how many lines were blank, which characters were being printed, and what band you had installed). They were about the size of a washer and dryer pair, and made a pretty big racket. The computer operators (!) loaded them with special "green band" paper stock that came in boxes about the size of a 12-ream box of printer paper you'd buy at OfficeDepot today, but it was all one big continuous z-fold piece, with sprocket holes down each side for the printer to grab and power it through the paper path. Jobs were printed with special "separator pages" to help to operators find where to split the perforated printouts and deliver them to the right users' collection bins.
Then in the 1980s, IBM came out with the 3800 laser printer, which was just insane for the time -- continuous form printing at speed, like a newspaper printing press. I got to operate them (my department had two).
> The computer operators (!) loaded them with special "green band" paper stock that came in boxes about the size of a 12-ream box of printer paper you'd buy at OfficeDepot today, but it was all one big continuous z-fold piece, with sprocket holes down each side for the printer to grab and power it through the paper path.
Loading paper onto those printers wasn't an easy or fun task; there were typically two tractor mechanisms, one below the printing area (usually inside the sound deadening enclosure), and one above it (still inside, but under the "lid" of the enclosure). You had to get things lined up just right, and then snap the feeds closed on the bottom (while kneeling and looking - sometimes with a flashlight - at an awkward angle under the printer, inside the enclosure, with a large box of paper in your way), then advance the paper past the print area, and align it properly with the second set of tractors, then close those - then run a test job. If all went well (which it usually did), you had things loaded and could continue with your other tasks.
Oh - and the cleaning of those printers - so much paper dust, plus the "chads" from the holes (not all were cleared on a run of paper, so the tractors would pop them out and they would get lost all over and inside the machine).
> Jobs were printed with special "separator pages" to help to operators find where to split the perforated printouts and deliver them to the right users' collection bins.
Fun times to find your "job" and split it off to take back to your cubicle; also fun to find someone else's job and deliver it to them on the way back. Sometimes they'd be thankful or surprised, but it was also fun to do it when they had gotten up to go to the printer - they'd get there, couldn't find their job (but could find the ones "around" it), go back to their desk in a huff, then sit down and find the printout on their desk...hehe.
I kinda miss those days (but I don't miss having to build and format reports - talk about a nightmare and thankless task).
The first company I worked for that started my career as an SWE was a small mom-n-pop shop; the wrote software for insurance companies.
I applied for a position (any position; at the time, I was still in school) and they hired and trained me as an "operator" (because I didn't have a degree, they told me, they couldn't hire me as a programmer). They put me in a small cold room with the main computer they worked on (via serial terminals) - an IBM RS/6000 AIX box. There was also a vacuum column 9-track tape drive (which they taught me how to load and use), and a large Genicom 4440 printer.
IIRC, the printer was a dot-matrix line printer, so it could fire one row of "dots" out, eventually forming the characters as the paper moved. Even in it's enclosure, it was loud, but it could rip thru a box of greenbar in no time flat.
The printer was something they sold as VAR to their clients, because it could handle multi-part carbon paper forms, like checks. We'd write programs to print to these custom forms (holding the paper up to the lights and lining up the characters with the form positions - ugh!). So, when the client used a program that printed, they were also expected to check if the printer was in the middle of a printing job, and had the write paper loaded.
Sometimes, though, we'd "dial in" to their machines to test certain code and get feedback via phone; sometimes that code was for a printer (imagine trying to debug proper printing formatting and such over a phone - hair pulling!). Well, sometimes they wouldn't check the printer before we'd run the software (even after we told them to do so). That printer would take off...
...and then we'd hear a scream over the phone for us to "stop the printer" because it would be ripping thru the box of multi-part check paper (actual physical checks with carbon copy) with whatever we were printing (generally, not checks).
Clients sometimes did this themselves as well - and eat thru an entire box of checks before they knew it; multipart check forms were (from what I understand) stupid-expensive (because they were custom printed for an individual account, not too mention the special paper they used, plus the carbon copy capability).
Ah - those were the days.
And yes, I eventually got hired as a programmer (aka SWE), before I turned 19; in between me loading tapes or running print jobs for the programming teams and such, I would also play around with learning the software they used (a variant of PICK called UniVERSE), writing small games and other such things. One of the sysadmins gave me a copy of a book on PICK to help me along, and they were "monitoring" my account. Eventually, they started handing me small tasks - "fix this bug" or "code this custom feature" - to see if I could do it.
I could, I did, and I eventually was hired, sans degree, as a programmer - and started my career that I still am doing today, as an SWE, nowadays doing SPAs using Node.js, React, and other technologies (I've lost track of the technologies and software over the years I have known, used, programmed in, etc - suffice to say, I haven't done it all, but I've carved a big chunk out, certainly).
Oh - and that place was also my introduction to Unix (via AIX on that IBB RISC platform); by the time I left that job, I knew terminfo like nobody - I had to, because we were always needing to set up clients systems with it properly to handle their serial terminals, and do it in a way that was also usable with terminal emulators on PCs, and such - it felt pretty crazy at the time).
Yes, many mainframe shops replaced their line printers with early lasers (which were super expensive, the price only came down after a couple of years).
Yup. At Georgia Tech, they attached a massive Xerox 9700 series laser printer to one of the CDC Cyber 180s (it may have been more complicated connection). It was a few hundred square feet of floor space for the whole install, it could spit out vast amounts of paper, and was pretty finicky to keep running. But (most) everyone liked it better than the equally massive, vastly louder, band printers.
