A truely "high-power" schematic generator.

[5-ht]

I wonder how many of these actually got installed?
See:
http://vimeo.com/75532300

Mark

[greg...@hotmail.com]

And that remarkable machine even uses nixie tubes....

I always wondered how schematics and other diagrams from that era were produced with such high quality; no offense to the drafting community, hand-drawn schematics never looked that crisp.

There were other CRT-based phototypesetting machines from the 1960's, and I'm sure some of them were used for schematics, etc. Apparently Linotype held-out with mechanical solutions as long as it could; kind of reminds me of Teletype.

[threeneurons]

One problem. Can't erase film. Early CAD would follow soon, so this would have a short product life.

I used to be a draftsman, early in my career, and had that classic draftsman's printing hand. Now, after using computers, for decades, my handwriting is undecipherable chicken scratching.

For working drawings, using the results from a mechanical pencil was just fine. For published documents (manuals, text books, ...) the drawing was done in ink, with the aid of templates. This was a difficult skill, since ink could run under, and bleed to an adjacent surface. Also, you can't erase ink, either.

When CAD hit the personal computer, things changed quickly. Printer technology lagged, and early drawings came out of pen plotters. A few specialty color dot matrix graphic printers were produced, but it took forever to draw a schematic, and the results a bit iffy, when compare to a plotter.

The general concept of this video did live on. There's the Gerber photo-plotter used to make artwork, for printed circuit boards. The Gerber file is still a common, if not dominant, format used in the PCB industry.

[Terry S]

Gerber is much more akin to pen plotter code than it would be to the concept in the video. I used a pen plotter back in the 80's for generating check plots of my PCB layouts done on an early Racal-Redac CAD system..  Then we also got a Versatec electrostatic plotter, another interesting device. Monochrome, but good for schematics.

[Alex]

I may be wrong but I would say gerber is much more akin to this photo plotter than a pen plotter since gerber data makes use of pre defined Aperture sizing and Co-Ordinate data, rather than pen up and pen down code... It took me a while to grasp the idea of an aperture as in the modern world it seems a really weird concept and it is through looking at the likes of this machine that one can appreciate its background.

- Alex