FTA: If you were curious about the “banner” command, which was historically used to generate ASCII text suitable for printing huge messages at dot matrix printers (!)
Dot matrix printers typically allow for better output than grids of monospaced characters, and, AFAIK, weren’t commonly used with computers when banner was written, so I would think it was made for line printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer), not dot matrix ones.
Dot matrix printers typically allow for better output than grids of monospaced characters, and, AFAIK, weren’t commonly used with computers when banner was written, so I would think it was made for line printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer), not dot matrix ones.
I don’t know when that was, but https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/src/games... has a man page dated October 1982. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/s1/... must be older since version 6 Unix is from 1975. Also, the man page supports that claim by saying
“you may want a printer or a fast hardcopy terminal, but if you are patient, a decwriter or other 300 baud terminal will do.”