I remember OKI Data printers from the 1970s and 1980s. They weren't the cheapest or most popular, but they were fast. I got a brochure from OKI today and saw that they still make dot-matrix impact printers that use a ribbon. They will work with multi-part forms and continuous feed labels. They also appear to have a very low operating cost, and I suspect they have a lower environmental impact compared to laser printers. They would only be good for text output, though.

I remember fixing one for a maintenance department over 10 years ago. When I showed up I had never seen one before but I knew of them, and I couldn't believe one was still in use (for their work orders). It kept jamming up and I removed some part on the front, like a guide or something, and turned it upside down (it was symmetrical in that regard) and it was back to normal. Never touched one again.

I used to really like them. I had a driver (sorry I don't remember the name) that looked like a type of markdown that made use of "in between" carriage shifts in order to increase the dot density, and thus output significantly better fonts.

For example, to bold something, you toggled with a .b (dot-bee). I don't remember how you un-bolded though, but it was similar. Same goes for underline, and also choosing entirely different fonts, font sizes, italics, super/subscript etc. Suddenly the printer that made all that blocky print normally, looked great as long as you didn't mind it taking more than twice the amount of time to print out.

It made amazingly good looking documents that wouldn't pass the muster at all since the invention of bubble and laser jets. Those were the days.

I very much dislike environmental noise (ASD and all), but for whatever reason I really kinda liked the intermittently steady drone that constantly changed pitches, and the occasional squawking that came along with it.