Dangerous Hardware 2480

I still have a working Dataproducts B600 lineprinter from the early 1980's. This does 600 lines-minute, but has 136 hammers, one for every character position so the hammer bar is fixed. The B300 had a hammer for every alternate position and moved the hammer bar back and forth to print in every position, but only managed less than half the print speed. (There was also a B1000 model, which was just a suped-up B600 to get to 1000 lines-minute.) Hitach Data Systems continued manufacturing these for a while after they bought out Dataproducts (or at least the spares), but I don't know when the last year of manufacture would have been.

I would guess your 1966 printer is a drum or chain printer (type characters mounted on a spinning drum or chain). By the 1980's, band printers had taken over from chain printers, with the type characters embossed on a steel band, although drum printers were still around but couldn't get to quite the same speed. The B300, B600, and B1000 are band printers. Dataproducts also manufactured drum printers which I used for many years, but I don't recall the model numbers now.

-- Andrew Gabriel