Yes, as some of you might remember, printer paper was very different then the paper we are familiar with today. Today, you can feed almost anything into a printer, but in the Analog Age, the paper was fed through all the really noisy dot matrix printers one line at a time using a wheel with little spokes on it. The paper was a complete long sheet with perforations for each page. The sides also needed to be removed.

It was kinda a pain in the butt, but you could make neat stuff out of the hole strips…

6 thoughts on “Artifacts from the Analog Age: Printer Paper

  1. Oh my… my family had one of those printers when I was tiny! I remember once I actually went to the unprinted paper box and tore off all the hole paper on one side for some project, completely ruining the box. I don’t remember my dad getting mad, but I think I hear a sigh of exasperation….. 🙂

  2. Savage says:

    I remember when we bought my $99 Epson dot matrix for college. It eventually died in a puff of smoke the following year, as I had so many reports to print.

  3. fluffy says:

    A lot of people still use this! Line printers are still great for high-speed bulk output purposes, and in systems administration where you need to keep a hard copy of a critical log and don’t want to lose a whole page’s worth if you have a catastrophic failure partway through, and so on. Plus, they make awesome sounds that can be great rhythm tracks for glitch music.

    There were a lot of names for the perforated sides but I always liked “frou-frou.”

  4. OH MAAANNN I used to love that paper! And the sounds of the dot matrix printer had some mad beats.

  5. Gaff1229 says:

    I used to make accordions with those strips.

  6. Chris Sobieniak says:

    My older brother hogged the C64 my mom got one year but I remember all the printed banners, greeting cards and other crap he’d do with the printer and all that paper.

    I feel copy/printer paper sold today has ruined the classic standby I learned to type with. I’m talking specifically about typing paper. Nobody in the world knows what I’m talking about, and it kills me thinking they don’t sell it anymore, opting instead to act like you can just use the same paper you have for your inkjet printer for your Underwood. It ain’t gonna happen!

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