"What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro." In the late 1960s the Satellite Test Center in Sunnyvale used what I think were IBM 1401 line-at-a-time drum printers. You heard a painful BRRAPP with each line printed. Lead-foil lined plywood boxes were finally devised to contain some of the noise, but I still had my guys use hearing protectors while they stood reading real-time octal feeds from an early VELA satellite. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1403.html[^] As for nostalgia, who is old enough to remember gazing in wonder at the magnetic core memory of the old SAGE AN/FSQ7 built by IBM? http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Magnetic-Core_Memory[^]