Question about OLD printers

Cedrus

Hi all,
I have been researching my family genealogy and have a (relatively recent) birth certificate from 1965, I had assumed that the details were typed onto a preprinted form with a standard typewriter. But, I just realised that the letters are made up of dots (5 high and 3 wide) briefly thought it was a dot matrix printer but some, particularly the full stops are punched right through the paper. It's not an Irish certificate. I'm thinking it was probably "pre-computer general access" so maybe I am in the wrong forum but I can't see a better one and maybe similar printers were used in the early days?

smuggler.ie

Your assumption regards dot matrix is most likely correct, unless cert issuing institution employ "ancient Egyptians" with tiny chisels

History of printing


So, whats the question?

Cedrus

Sorry, the question is "What kind of printer was it likely to be" I think 1965 predates any kind of printer I know of. I can't see any reason why a typewriter would have dots instead of solid lines and it is definitely some kind of impact print because some of the dots are punched right through the paper.

ED E

Its not too early tbh. IBM systems had such printers a decade earlier.

It's not an Irish certificate.

If its somewhere like the states its far more likely a state govt/hosp would have upgraded from pen and paper recordkeeping by then, here we'd wait another 30yrs :rolleyes:

Spook_ie

Dot matrix printers go back a long time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing

Early history
In 1925, Rudolf Hell invented the Hellschreiber, an early facsimile-like dot matrix-based teletypewriter device,[11] patented in 1929.

Between 1952 and 1954 Fritz Karl Preikschat filed five patent applications[12][13][14] for his teletype writer 7 stylus 35 dot matrix aka PKT printer,[11] a dot matrix teletypewriter built between 1954 and 1956 in Germany.[14] Like the earlier Hellschreiber, it still used electromechanical means of coding and decoding, but it used a start-stop method (asynchronous transmission) rather than synchronous transmission for communication.[11] In 1956, while he was employed at Telefonbau und Normalzeit GmbH (TuN, later called Tenovis), the device was introduced to the Deutsche Bundespost (German Post Office), which did not show interest. When Preikschat emigrated into the US in 1957 he sold the rights to utilize the applications in any countries (except for the USA) to TuN.[14] The prototype was also shown to General Mills in 1957.[15] An improved transistorized design[11] became the basis for a portable dot matrix facsimile machine, which was prototyped and evaluated for military use by Boeing around 1966–1967.[16][17]

The first non-impact dot matrix printer was marketed by IBM in 1957.[18][19]

Cedrus

Thank you all for your knowledge, I have learned something today, which was what I was hoping for.