Nicholas Bodley <nbodley at speakeasy dot net> wrote:

> I strongly suspect that 24-pin impact dot-matrix (and thermal?)
> printers were developed by the Japanese to be able to print their
> standard ~2,300+ kanji acceptably.

This is known to be true. American companies had been perfectly
satisfied with the rendering of ASCII on 9-pin printers.

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/