Daisy wheel printer
An impact printer with fully formed letters on the spokes of an interchangeable wheel, built for letter-quality output.
The name comes from the wheel: dozens of thin spokes arranged like a daisy, each ending in a moulded character. The wheel spins until the right glyph faces a hammer that whacks it against the ribbon. The result is a fully formed letter, crisp as a typewriter's — hence "letter-quality" — unlike the dot matrix printer's cloud of dots. Diablo Systems introduced the technique around 1972.
The price of that sharpness was rigidity: the wheel knew only the characters cast into it, so changing typeface meant physically swapping wheels, and graphics were out of the question. It was also slow and as loud as a machine gun. When the laser printer arrived in the 1980s offering letter quality, any font and near-silence, the daisy wheel vanished almost overnight.