A productive evening
My Adler Contessa de Luxe now works! It has a lovely font. I cleaned it, changed (respooled) the ribbon, and made a few little adjustments. It still has two problems: one of the sticky keys is still sticky (the others aren't anymore), and the bell doesn't work most of the time. But I'm happy, it's the first machine I actually repaired.
This is essentially what early digital printers were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
The letter hammers were rearranged into a circle which would spin to align the character with the page:
Basically the same mechanism as the typewriter, without the keyboard.
This was later replaced with dot-matrix printers, which were similar in that a mechanical striker would whack an ink ribbon into a sheet of paper to make a mark. The dot-matrix replaced the fixed characters of the daisy wheel with a row of pins that could be selectively raised or lowered to make different patterns of dots:
Well, there's always ASCII...
My very first printer, lent to me by a friend, was a dot printer. I both hated it (for the stupid amont of noise it was making and the (lack of) printing quality) and loved it (because it was so cool, and it was my first printer). I printed an entire book draft using that and probably started losing some hearing at the same time too :p