Surveyors, adding to "Why no Programs for 7470 plotter "

[4ster]

Instead of adding to this thread which went interestingly off track: http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-6604.html

Thanks to a member here I recently acquired a 7470 option 003 plotter. And it got me to thinking about one of my first professional uses of my 41CV. As a newly minted forester, one of the key pieces of information I was expected to develop was the area of parcels of land for harvest and re-planting. Most of the time these areas were not easy to model geometric shapes.

There are a number of ways to deal with this in the field, one common method was to do a quick field traverse with a hand compass and pace. I would then plot the traverse out on paper by hand. I was a pretty good pacer and amazingly, most of the time, the traverse would close "close enough" for an acreage estimate. My new HP-41CV made the process a lot easier.

GPS, hand held laser distance measuring devices and easily available satellite photography has made the above method archaic. At the time, I would have killed to be able to plot the shape of my traverse on a plotter instead of plotting coordinates by hand for the report.

Even though a 41 and 7470 plotter would be woefully inadequate for most surveying applications, it would have made small mapping tasks a lot easier at the time. I don't recall running across anything like that in the program library or any forestry publication to which I was subscribed.

Were there any programs published for this purpose? Or, did I just conceive of the 7470 "killer app" for foresters - 35 years too late? :-)