FTA: If you were curious about the “banner” command, which was historically used to generate ASCII text suitable for printing huge messages at dot matrix printers (!)
Dot matrix printers typically allow for better output than grids of monospaced characters, and, AFAIK, weren’t commonly used with computers when banner was written, so I would think it was made for line printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer), not dot matrix ones.
There was a pretty good time interval between dot matrix printers becoming a thing and any kind of dot addressable graphics. For many years you just sent them regular old ascii codes and got text.
I think communication interfaces had to come up in speed for it to make sense, and memory on the computer to hold an entire page of pixels. I mean, at 72dpi that's 50KB just for the data! You were mostly into the IBM PC era before that was a thing.
> and memory on the computer to hold an entire page of pixels. I mean, at 72dpi that's 50KB just for the data!
Fwiw it was common for text editors at the time to render/raster in chunks and then send that off to the printer. For complicated documents, the printer sometimes had to take pauses while the computer worked
On the dot matrix printers, the text mode was much faster than the graphics mode. So you could print pretty graphics, but you would have wait for your printout.
Dot matrix printers typically allow for better output than grids of monospaced characters, and, AFAIK, weren’t commonly used with computers when banner was written, so I would think it was made for line printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer), not dot matrix ones.
I don’t know when that was, but https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/src/games... has a man page dated October 1982. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/s1/... must be older since version 6 Unix is from 1975. Also, the man page supports that claim by saying
“you may want a printer or a fast hardcopy terminal, but if you are patient, a decwriter or other 300 baud terminal will do.”