Occasionally, you can find one on craigslist or at a yard sale for a couple of bucks. They're pretty much indestructable, and printer ribbons can be found online.
I used to work as a service rep at an airline. We used these things extensively for printing airline tickets. These tickets had four red carbon-copy type pages that needed to be printed at once, and a dot-matrix printer is the only thing that handeled this well. It was a small office and we had just a rickety old Star Gemini II printer, but I must have printed thousands of tickets with it before it was decomissioned when e-tickets made their entrance.
I used to work as a service rep at an airline. We used these things extensively for printing airline tickets. These tickets had four red carbon-copy type pages that needed to be printed at once, and a dot-matrix printer is the only thing that handeled this well. It was a small office and we had just a rickety old Star Gemini II printer, but I must have printed thousands of tickets with it before it was decomissioned when e-tickets made their entrance.