Old Enough to Drink

[Amalitza]

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]

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.

[Amalitza]

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...

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

[baiskeli]

Old-school plotter:

http://media.soundonsound.com/sos/de...rdxy100r.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.

[APKhaos]

In the plotter generation, line printers were the top dog for text. Massive drum spinning at high speed with little hammers for each character position [fixed pitch text of course].
These babies could do a rocking 1200 lines/minute [around 20 pages/minute] on large format z fold paper with those ubiquitous serrated sprocket hole edges.
Nobody has these at home, but corporations and government agencies had rooms full of them.