I seem to recall Hewlett-Packard used to make probably in the late 1980s, portable typewriter-like things with a keyboard and a roll, but instead of a printing head, a plotter capable of using four colour pens to "print" the letters typed on the keybo...
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
Looks like I was thinking about Panasonic RK-P440, not a Hewlett-Packard product.
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@riley Sure, but also the HP7475A https://shop.unigreenscheme.co.uk/other-lab-equipment/hewlett-packard-hp-7475a-desktop-6-pen-plotter-zoazd
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Regionales Retro-Rechenzentrumreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley Panasonic RK-P400 or Silver Reed Color PenGraph EB50
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@drj This doesn't have a keyboard or a typewriter mode, though.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
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@riley These are endlessly fascinating! I’ve collected a few of them and wrote a post about them if you’re interested:
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@paulrickards Thanks, I'll take a look. I'm a bit miffed, though, that I can't read the manual on Internet Archive, on account of some anti-book activists having damaged its infrastructure.
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Michael Porterreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley I owned one of these, briefly, in the early 80s. 1983/84, I think. It had a typewriter form factor, no connectivity that I recall. No idea which brand.
It was fun to watch it draw each letter, not so fun when you were trying to complete an assignment and you realized that the tiny pens were running out of ink. I took it back to the store and exchanged it for a thermal (I think) ribbon-based electronic typewriter. It took me a few years before I got my own PC and printer
Makes me think of those slide rules with built-in electronic calculators - tech is evolving, an old device is rapidly becoming obsolete, but we don’t quite have our vision of the future straightened out yet
(Had to look this up to convince myself that I hadn’t dreamt it - a lot of electronic calculators were marketed as “electronic slide rule calculators”, but Faber-Castell actually made a few hybrid models during the transition, see https://sliderulemuseum.org/Faber.shtml and scroll down to the TR1, TR2 and TR3 models) -
Riley S. Faelanreplied to Michael Porter last edited by
@MichaelPorter Yeah, that's a silly way to do a slide rule. a proper electronic slide rule would involve a high-precision digital readout for the slider's position instead.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to paulrickards last edited by
@paulrickards Btw, speaking of replacement pens — Brother still makes tiny plotter pens, although now for its cutting plotters, the Scan-n-Cut series. With a 3D-printed adapter, these might be usable in the old machines.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to paulrickards last edited by
@paulrickards Do you have any ROM dumps that you could share?
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paulrickardsreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley The Brother pens look really big compared to the Alps pens.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@MichaelPorter Hey, now I wonder about using the sort of tech inside Apple Pencil for advanced digital planimetry.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to paulrickards last edited by
@paulrickards Pity. It's always sad when old tech loses its functionality merely because supplies that were once common become out-fashioned.
(I'd touch my pack of carbon paper to ward off bad luck, but I lost it several moves ago. :blobcatblush2:)
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Michael Porterreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley
Not to mention an OLED display for the numbers on the ruler itself - that way, you can turn on whatever scale you want, instead of having 6 different scales(The music on that video is offensive! But I liked the way they did the captions
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Michael Porterreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley No idea, but I assume position information comes from the device with the screen as opposed to the Apple Pencil. So the map would have to be on a screen, unless you introduce more tech inside the Pencil. Maybe you could modify one of those “scanners in a stylus” devices?
You brought back another memory from my undergrad days - we didn’t have access to the really nice machines, so if we wanted to determine the area under a curve for a spectroscopic or chromatographic plot, we would photocopy the plot, physically (with scissors*) cut out the curve in question, weigh it to a few decimal places, and compare to the weight of a known area of paper. The precision of the cut, and the consistency of the paper added a couple more sources of uncertainty
*Young ‘uns don’t appreciate TRUE cutting and pasting these days
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Michael Porter last edited by
@MichaelPorter Yep, with a current Pencil, you'd need a positioning grid underneath the paper. But, AFAIU, it's not there to itself decide the position, but to provide a precision-shaped electic field grid for the Pencil to measure, since current MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes aren't precise enough to decide absolute coordinates of the Pencil's tip just yet.
I believe Apple uses the same technique as Watcom's graphics pads, although I'm not sure if they're similar enough to be compatible with each other. In any case, Watcom's pads have usually had raised bevels, and Apple's pads come without such bevels, which makes those friendlier towards shoving the pad underneath a page in a bound book for a quick planimetric measurement.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Michael Porter last edited by [email protected]
@MichaelPorter If Newton had been more influential on the 20th century, perhaps fancy advanced calipers and slide rules would have had some sort of difractional grating mechanisms for multi-digit precision-reading, instead of the Vernier scales that don't really go further than three digits at the hand-sized tech.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Michael Porter last edited by
@MichaelPorter Imagine numbers of each scale being lit up by a different light-guide, so you could switch over which scale's numbers shine brightly.
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Michael Porterreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley I own a Wacom tablet and an iPad, so you got me curious (links below, ff your’e interested).
It looks like the surface does all the work in detecting the pen and its position. The Wacom basic styluses have an LC circuit in them, tuned to a particular frequency (or range of frequencies, rather). I’m sure Apple uses a different frequency, but wouldn’t be surprised if the new crop of Wacom wannabes (that have arisen since the expiration of the relevant patents) use the same frequency as Wacom so as to take advantage of compatibility (sell pens to Wacom owners, sell tablets to people who have pens, etc. Total speculation on my part there, though.
More bells and whistles, in the form of accelerometers and gyroscopes you mentioned, require power, so the Pencil needs to be charged while my Wacom stylus does not.
My Wacom tablet does not have a raised bevel, so either device would be fine for laying a piece of paper on. Seeing the effect of that paper on the capacitance will have to wait until after I walk my dog
Links that helped me (not an endorsement, just the first ones I came across. If you know of better ones I’d love to have ‘em):
https://essentialpicks.com/how-apple-pencil-work/
https://essentialpicks.com/emr-stylus-how-wacom-pens-work/
