1980s pen plotter - GIF

**Altair** · Jan 27, 2020, 08:13 PM

Pen plotter from the 1980s.

Previously:

Curta mechanical pocket calculator - photos
Mechanical calculator trying to divide by zero
4.5 megabytes of data represented by punch cards - photo
Jacquard loom puncher - GIF

**bruce.desertrat** · Jan 28, 2020, 06:23 PM

My very first professional programming gig (Ie: something I was paid to do, the rest of my day job was lab tech, this was 1984-ish) was writing the front end applications (data analysis and outout) to our newly-converted-to-digital Instron Test Machine on a HP DOS compatible, which had a great BASIC HPGL library for our 6-pen HP plotter, back in the day. A fellow lab tech was the one who wrote the A-D conversion software for this big HP multichannel A/D converter..

**Duke_of_URL** · Jan 28, 2020, 06:42 PM

When you had one of those you felt you'd hit the big-time as an Engineer. Brings back great memories.

**Crusty** · Jan 28, 2020, 06:58 PM

I remember those. Our drafting department even had a big one of those that would do D size drawings and it was used quite a bit.

We had a PDP-11 sitting around that we made into a file server for the drafting folks so they wouldn't have to walk over and stick a floppy into the driving pc for a print. It was a crude bare bones network where when you sent a file you had to first holler to the department that you were going to transmit a file so that no one else would transmit and so avoided data collisions on the wire, but it worked and all it cost was a little bit of time.