Lp0 on fire
Old printer error message in some operating systems
lp0 on fire (also known as Printer on Fire) is an outdated error message generated on some Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems in response to certain types of printer errors. lp0 is the Unix device handle for the first line printer, but the error can be displayed for any printer attached to a Unix or Linux system. It indicates a printer error that requires further investigation to diagnose, but not necessarily that it is on fire.
Printer flammability
In the late 1950s, high speed computerized printing was still a somewhat experimental field. The first documented fire-starting printer was a Stromberg-Carlson 5000 xerographic printer (similar to a modern laser printer, but with a CRT as the light source instead of a laser), installed around 1959 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and modified with an extended fusing oven to achieve a print speed of one page per second. In the event of a printing stall, and occasionally during normal operation, the fusing oven would cause the paper to combust. This fire risk was aggravated by the fact that if the printer continued to operate, it would feed a fire with fresh paper at high speed. However, there is no evidence of the "lp0 on fire" message appearing in any software of the time.
As the technology matured, most large printer installations were drum printers, a type of impact printer which could print an entire line of text at once through the use of a high speed rotary printing drum. It was thought that in the event of a severe jam, the friction of paper against the drum could ignite either the paper itself, or, in a dirty machine, the accumulated paper and ink dust in the mechanism.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lp0 on fire” is old printer error message in some operating systems. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through fire, printer and error, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6694723. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lp0 on fire” 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.