Input Devices in the Dental Environment

The inexorable march of computers into all areas of dental practice started in the 1980s. In the early years, this technology was limited to accounting procedures that ran under text-based operating systems like MS-DOS without having many other capabilities. However, billing software was still a huge improvement over manual billing, which was the common practice of the day. In those days, it was necessary to fill out patient insurance forms by hand, and a dot matrix printer was used to print full-surface stickon labels, which had to be adhered to the originals of the insurance forms.