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.