The plotting thickens

It’s the late 1970s and pilot fish is working for a small company that produces custom solutions involving computer hardware, software or both. A large customer wants a pair of drafting machines — pen plotters that can produce large-scale physical engineering drawings from CAD systems. 

And fish’s company comes through, integrating the plotters with DEC PDP-11 computers, which had a pair of DEC RX-01 8-inch floppy disk drives to import and export the CAD data. The flatbed plotters measured about 4 by 10 feet, and the huge sheets of BoPET polyester film that are used for the drawings rather than paper are held in place by tiny holes in the flatbed that lead to a vacuum chamber, like an air hockey table running in reverse.

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