Will HP do for 3D Printing what they did for Pen Plotting back in the early 80's... 1

I just saw this item today...


...and while a new 3D Printer is not news, I couldn't help but think back to the days when the only direct 'physical' output from a CAD system was a Drawing.

A standard part of virtually all CAD systems has been a 'plotter' so that Drawings could be 'printed'. Back in the early days of the CAD industry (I've been part of that history since 1977) plotters were large and often rather expensive pieces of equipment. When the company I worked for (back in Saginaw, MI) installed our first CAD/CAM system in 1977, included was what was then the cutting-edge in plotting, a Calcomp 960. Now this was an E-size, two-pen, belt-plotter which cost over $50K (and this was in 1977 dollars). Now that was a deal. Across town a the GM Steering Gear plant, they were using a Xynetics flatbed-plotter that cost them well over $100K and our Calcomp was much faster. However, they both suffered from the same inconvenience of having to clean pens, keep them filled with ink and if you needed more than two line widths, you had to change pens and re-plot, which was a real pain-in-the-###, but that was state-of-the-art at the time and still an amazing thing to watch your perfectly lettered Drawings being produced at the push of a button.

Well a few years later, after I had changed careers and went to work for McDonnell Douglas selling CAD systems, we were still limited pretty much that same pen-plotter technology. By then the large-format (D- and E-size) plotting was dominated by brands like Calcomp (Flatbed and Belt-plotters), Benson (Drum plotters), Xynetics (Flatbed), Gerber (Flatbed and Photo plotters), etc., all of them large and expensive.

Then in 1981 HP introduced the HP 7580. This was a D-size, eight-pen, so-called 'grit-wheel' plotter (that simply pinched the drawing sheet between a set of grit-wheels to move it thus eliminating the need to tape down your drawing sheet) which was very fast and cost less than $16K. Now it's true that HP had been in the plotter business for years, making smaller lab-sized X-Y plotters (I used them in college back in the late 60's early 70's), but when they moved into the full-size engineering drawing business, nothing was ever the same. And it wasn't just the price point, but also the shape factor and with the support for true multi-pen plotting it opened up things more use of colors and such. But one thing else it did was to make the technology more practical for everyone.

Case-in-point: When we sold our first CAD system with one of those new HP 7580 plotters I can remember when our installation group (remember in those days CAD systems were generally sold turn-key with CAD Terminals, CPU's, Disk Drives, Printers, Tape Decks, Paper-tape punches/readers, often digitizers and of course a plotter) calling up HP and asking when they could schedule a service tech to 'install' the plotter at the customers site (since this was the first HP plotter we had sold, our people had no experience with them). Anyway, the HP people thought it was a joke or something since all you had to do was plug it in, connect it to the CPU, turn it on and go. This was one of the first high-tech devices where the 'installation instructions' were what you'd call a sort of 'comic-book' like format with mostly pictures showing what plugged into what and almost no text whatsoever.

For anyone out there who doesn't gp back as far as I do in this industry, here's a few images of those original plotters we had to contend with:



Calcomp 960 belt-plotter



Xynetics flatbed-plotter



HP 7580B plotter

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that perhaps HP will have the same effect on where 3D Printing is going as it did on Plotting. After all, anyone who can remember the early 3D Systems and Stratasys Stereolithography machines can see how these newer generation devices have already come a long ways and when someone as large and significant as HP, with their lonmg history of '2D printing' moves into the next 'dimension', well it will be fun to watch.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
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