Line Printer - Current Applications

Current Applications

While the limited character set, fixed character spacing, and relatively poor print quality make impact line printers unsuitable for correspondence, books, and other applications requiring high print quality, the technology is cost-effective and remains in limited use in a number of applications such as printing box labels, medium volume accounting and other large business applications.

The names of the lp and lpr commands in Unix were derived from the term "line printer". Analogously, many other systems call their printing devices "LP", "LPT", or some similar variant, whether these devices are in fact line printers or other types of printers. These references served to distinguish formatted final output from normal interactive output from the system, which in many cases in line printer days was also printed on paper (as by a teletype) but not by a line printer. Lineprinters printed characters, letters and numbers line by line.