[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable

[Rich Morin]

I've heard stories about a very high speed dot matrix printer used (IIRC) at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.  Apparently, it used a bank of Hydrogen Thyratrons to multiplex high voltage onto a set of metal needles.  The resulting sparks burned tiny black holes into the paper at 24K LPM.

It occurs to me that it could probably have been used for graphics, typesetting, and such, but I dunno.  Might anyone here be able to talk about (or provide links about) this beast?

-r