Line printer
impact printer that prints one entire line of text at a time
A line printer prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line.
Line printers are mostly associated with unit record equipment and the early days of digital computing, but the technology is still in use. Print speeds of 600 lines per minute (approximately 10 pages per minute) were achieved in the 1950s, later increasing to as much as 1200 lpm. Line printers print a complete line at a time and have speeds in the range of 150 to 2500 lines per minute.
Some types of impact line printers are drum printers, band-printers, and chain printers. Non-impact technologies have also been used, e.g., thermal line printers were popular in the 1970s and 1980s, some inkjet and laser printers produce output a line or a page at a time.
Designs
Many impact printers, such as the daisywheel printer and dot matrix printer, used a print head that printed a character then moved on until an entire line was printed. Line printers were much faster, as each impact printed an entire line.
There have been five principal designs:
Drum printers
Chain (train) printers
Bar printers
Comb printers
Wheel printers
Because all of these printing methods were noisy, line printers of all designs were enclosed in sound-absorbing cases of varying sophistication.
Timing-sensitive designs
Several designs of printers have similar characteristics.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Line printer” is impact printer that prints one entire line of text at a time. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Line, printer and impact, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1320033. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1200.
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This entry incorporates text from “Line printer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.