Re: Actually back in the 1990s I was at a company...
Lemme guess - Serial comms, and cheap cables without the DTR pin connected?
I think it was actually some weird optimisation in HP laser printers that was supposed to save memory*. It wasn't very well implemented, so the output occasionally have bits missing.
*Printers of the time, especially PostScript ones, would often fail to print complex pages because of insufficient memory.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
