Old Enough to Drink

[Tim Kelley]

One of the long time bikers here in Arlington passed along some 20+ years old swag from the first Bike To Work Day!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]5680[/ATTACH]

Topic

[baiskeli]

I still have that button on the right.

[JimF22003]

Was that thing printed on a PLOTTER?

[mstone]

@JimF22003 86101 wrote:

Was that thing printed on a PLOTTER?

I was going to make a comment about having used a plotter not that long ago, but then I realized it was back in the 90s.

[Drewdane]

@JimF22003 86101 wrote:

Was that thing printed on a PLOTTER?

What’s a plotter? :p

(no seriously – what’s a plotter?)

[Tim Kelley]

@Drewdane 86114 wrote:

What’s a plotter? :p

(no seriously – what’s a plotter?)

It’s a type of printer, commonly used for large scale prints.

(I was a history major, so I read about those once in a textbook)

[brendan]

Now I’m having flashbacks to the piezoelectric carbon ampule printer my dad got from the DAK catalog that printed like a dot matrix printer, except instead of 10 vertical pixels per horizontal traversal, it printed one line of pixels per horizontal traversal, but it traversed very very very fast (at least for devices of the time). In draft mode, all the characters looked a bit like they were shivering…

B

[mstone]

It’s a kind of a printer in which the device held actual pens which were moved up and down and along geometric paths via a motor. They were unbelievably slow, but could produce actual circles vs jagged curves, and usually had selectable colors. They were mainly used for architectural/mechanical drafting and that sort of work involving fine details, and could often be used for really large output (multi-foot wide paper spools). They sucked for simple text, and are basically obsolete now that high-resolution laser & inkjet printers are ubiquitous. (Jagged edges are now too small to see.)

[Kolohe]

I dunno, the government agency (natch) I used to work for until last year had plotters for large printouts (e.g. table sized maps)

[PeteD]

Last I worked for had laser plotters (for network diagrams). Nothing better than something that can actually print out something at an ANSI E size in less than 15 seconds. Except, dat toner cartridge replacement cost…

–Pete

[Anonymous]

@Kolohe 86128 wrote:

I dunno, the government agency (natch) I used to work for until last year had plotters for large printouts (e.g. table sized maps)

We have one in my office. It’s still in use.

[mstone]

@acl 86140 wrote:

We have one in my office. It’s still in use.

Like with actual pens, not an injet?

[dkel]

Now that we’re totally off topic: when I was a kid, the first computer we had in my house was one of these. Then we upgraded to one of these. There was no printer. Or monitor. Or qwerty keyboard (hexadecimal input only). Or even a plastic shell to house the thing.

[Anonymous]

@mstone 86152 wrote:

Like with actual pens, not an injet?

Ha, funny. I went upstairs to look at it to confirm it was the old-style (I didn’t say *I* use it), and we have a new one (inkjet, obv). I have no idea when we got that… trying to remember last time I saw the old one… sometime in the last couple years (?)… I know it was there when my office moved from upstairs near it to downstairs where I am now, which was sometime around 2010
never mind…:o

((jeez, i am not that old, i swear)

[baiskeli]

Old-school plotter:

http://media.soundonsound.com/sos/dec04/images/roland17aplotterdxy100r.l.jpg

[baiskeli]

My dad had a TRS-80 in his office that I played with. The CPU and disk drive was so heavy it was furniture – part of the desk that was included with the computer. The daisy-wheel printer shook the whole desk when it printed. The disks were 8-inch floppies.

Good times.

[IMG]http://oldcomputers.net/pics/TRS-80-II_table.JPG[/IMG]

[Author]

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