In 1997, I bought a new car. Look at that dot matrix printer in the finance office. Bet I'll never see one of those again for the rest of my life.

I got into my financial situation by not wasting money, and it seems a properly maintained 90s car could last 16 years..

You guessed it, October of 2014 and there's still a dot matrix printer in the financial office.

I've worked with cheap lasers and I've worked with expensive lasers and from a labor cost perspective it would take several thousand dollars to get a new laser as fast as the dot matrix, so I can't blame them. The latency of completely printing a form was perhaps 1/4 the time it takes a typical laser to warm the fuser, and surely the energy cost is lower...