An impact printer needs to physically strike a ribbon against the paper to make a mark, which is where the name comes from. In the early days of the computer era, the best print quality came from so-called daisy-wheel printers, which worked pretty much like a typewriter operated by a superhumanly fast typist. They printed beautifully, but they were slow, couldn't do graphics and above all were noisy. It wasn't quite like working in a roomful of jackhammers, but it was close. Many offices also used dot-matrix printers, which formed letters by hammering pins against the paper to make the correct pattern. Their print quality wasn't as good, and they were still noisy, but a dot-matrix printer was faster and could print graphics. For high-speed, high-volume use, there were line printers. These printed a whole line at each strike, and could use either movable type – like a daisy-wheel printer – or a whole line's worth of pins, like a dot-matrix printer on steroids. These were horrendously noisy too, but did their work in separate printing facilities where you didn't have to listen to them.