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.
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.