Tore apart one of those old drum printers. That bronze print drum weighed like 5 pounds. Had small driver boards, 1 for each printhead. Paper would FLY through those machines.
Yep, the top of the line drum printers would spit out 1200 lines a min or faster of paper movement. This often created a static electricity problem with the paper moving through the printer so fast that special grounding brushes were needed to bleed off the charge on the paper. Also aliment of 132 print hammers so that the printed characters were perfectly flat across the line was a very laborious and time consuming maintenance task, I hated having to perform that check and adjustment. The testing involved firing all 132 hammers at the same time and using a scope to measure the counter EMF pulse from each hammer relative to the first hammer and mechanically adjusting each hammer to match the reference hammer. The lights would dim each time all the hammers fired at the same time and the noise level was deafening.
Lefty