Printable View
Pen plotter from the 1980s.
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Previously:
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...896#post108875
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...6452#post83701
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...404#post150836
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...482#post151161
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..
When you had one of those you felt you'd hit the big-time as an Engineer. Brings back great memories.
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.
My first patents were things I first printed out on a big HP pen plotter!
Forrest
I made a pen holder for my 3d printer so I could do plots like this. :)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3067451