[HN Gopher] Resurrecting an Old Plotter (2019)
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Resurrecting an Old Plotter (2019)
Author : dbalan
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-02-03 07:48 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.dbalan.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.dbalan.in)
| buescher wrote:
| "affordable" = $1295 at launch in 1985.
|
| I am pretty sure I used one of these, or a closely related HP
| plotter, in one of my internships to make charts for a
| presentation, using Harvard Graphics on a DOS machine. I remember
| they looked much better than I expected. It's probably hard to
| get a sense of the quality of either the plotter's output or,
| say, the quality of programs like Harvard Graphics without using
| them together.
| cr4ig_ wrote:
| One of my favorite "dead tech" memories is from when I worked as
| a CAD operator for an engineering firm in the late 1980s, where
| we had a half-dozen AutoCAD workstations and a Roland pen plotter
| that used a large roll (several hundred feet long) of feed paper.
| In AutoCAD, you could sometimes fat-finger your work and kick a
| drawn entity way out into coordinate space without noticing it.
| As such you always needed to do a zoom extents every so often
| (and definitely before plotting it) to make sure you didn't have
| your own little Nemesis object lurking out in the dark.
|
| My co-worker neglected to do this one time and casually sent the
| document to the plotter to be drawn. When the plotter reached the
| entity way out in coordinate space, you heard the click-thunk of
| switching pens and then a high pitched whine as the plotter
| started rapidly spooling out paper to draw it. I've never seen
| anyone move so fast as he dove to reach the plotter power switch
| before all the paper scrolled off the spool and onto the floor.
|
| Plotters were state of the art back then but they have pretty
| much disappeared without a trace. I think the technology has been
| somewhat repurposed to make vinyl sign cutters, they are
| basically a plotter with a cutting blade attached instead of a
| pen.
| beardicus wrote:
| auto-upvote for anything plotter-related... they're so much fun.
|
| be sure to check out #plottertwitter on the twitter tubes (oops,
| totally missed that this was called out in the very first
| sentence), and i've also been collecting useful plotter-related
| links here:
|
| https://github.com/beardicus/awesome-plotters
|
| (one last edit / promo: if you get the nostalgia fuzzies for
| plotters, be sure to check out the "Manuals and Ephemera" section
| of the above repo, where i've linked up a bunch of plotter-
| related manuals and brochures and advertisements from the
| internet archive)
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh thank you, that's a very useful collection of links!
|
| I'm currently trying to diagnose what appears to be a stuck-bit
| issue on an HP 7596A Draftmaster II, which is an E-sized
| behemoth reputed to be quite the speed demon when it's all up
| and running. Really looking forward to having it around.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Those old pen plotters are beautiful to watch. I used to use them
| many, many years ago, and it was great fun.
|
| You'd get annoyed sometimes because you'd watch it draw half of
| something, zip waaaay over to the other end of the 30x42 in
| sheet, draw half of something else, and then zip back and finish.
| I mean, that's neat and all, but really inefficient.
|
| They also made a lot of architecture firms change their logos. If
| you had a logo with a big, solid black shape somewhere, the
| plotter trying to fill it in would often just tear through the
| paper.
|
| This was also back in the days when Ethernet was some weird thing
| only found in Dennis Ritchie's office. So if you had a lot of CAD
| stations who all needed to use the plotter, you'd have a whole
| shelf of serial switchboxes and a baroque and byzantine process
| to select who gets to plot. And woe unto the poor serf who messed
| with the switch boxes and cut a plot short. At upwards of 20
| minutes a sheet sometimes, you might find yourself hurled into
| the void.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| I worked at an engineering office which had a monstrously big
| plotter; the paper was draped over a single large roller, the pen
| only moved in one dimension along the axis and the roller rotated
| clockwise and anticlockwise to move the paper in the second
| dimension. That thing absolutely flew, and it was mesmerising
| watching the paper zipping around driven by that roller.
| tpmx wrote:
| I built a partial HP-GL importer to our small CAD visualization
| startup's internal vector data structure ~20 years ago. I
| remember thinking HP-GL was quite elegantly designed, especially
| for being so old (1977).
|
| Always wanted one of these plotters, just because they were
| amazing pieces of machinery, moving so insanely quickly.
| gennarro wrote:
| After somewhat obsessing over the old plotters I bought one, and
| now I find I don't have much I want to do with it? I've been
| playing with a few things in Inkscape and some js I wrote but
| that's it. Any suggestions on where to go next?
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