"The printer was the first drum printer that I had ever seen. It would print 1500 lines per minute alphanumeric, and 1800 lines per minute when only numeric values were being printed. It cost $243,450. Its reliability was somewhat suspect. I walked through the room that it was kept in every day for a year, and the only time that I ever saw it working was at a trade show in Los Angeles. The main reason that I went to the show was that I heard that the printer was there and working. I suspect that the printer was a strong contributor to the demise of Toni Schumans' career with Burroughs. Doug Bolitho was giving a plant tour to a group of potential customers one day and he somehow had the printer printing something. Toni walked into the room and loudly exclaimed "My God it's working". She left Burroughs shortly after the incident."
It's an excerpt from an autobiography. The article as a whole originally came up because the author worked for a summer with Donald Knuth - as in, Donald Knuth of the Art of Computer Programming, the quintessential tome of accurate, elegant, academic, truth-on-a-whiteboard computer science. Presumably Knuth sometimes walked by the non-operative printer some days in the morning too. His job at the company was to write a compiler, and reportedly it was a very good one.
Success and failure in the state-of-the-art have always coexisted. I sit here - as an iPhone programmer, who has recently had to deal with annoying provisioning issues, LLVM and GCC compilation problems, and advertising networks - and I can look through the window of my office to see our printer, which is located behind the water cooler, available over a wireless network, and can accurately print a requested piece of paper the first time I send a print command from my laptop. I think it cost $200 from the office store - in 2011 dollars, before accounting for inflation.
[1] http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7