What good is an HP plotter?

[Garth Wilson]

I'd like to have the 7470 or 7475, as long as I could get pens for it. I would use it to draw graphs with my 41 or 71. These plotters have a lot of built-in functions, offloading some of that from the calculator, like calculating the individual characters' segments for labels, and labeling in different directions IIRC. My employer had one in a back room of a facility I seldom visited, and I said, "If you ever decide to get rid of that, I'd like to have it." Well, I guess they forgot, and when they moved, I think it probably went to E-waste. What a shame.

At my last previous place of work, in the late 1980's, we used one to draw printed circuit boards from the CAD. This was back when you had to do the artwork (either manually taped, or drawn on your plotter), take those films to the graphic-arts house to have them reduce them to the actual size to make the PC boards, and then drive the reduced films to the board house. Later the board houses had their own BBSs (remember those?) and we could send the files over the phone lines without leaving the office. After that, there was the internet, although still on dial-up before we had DSL or faster services.