Is it true that plotters were the first graphical device to be controlled by computers? before oscilloscopes?
Doesn't really make a difference to the point in the article. Both are "vector" devices. But I'm curious about the history.
Doesn't really make a difference to the point in the article. Both are "vector" devices. But I'm curious about the history.
Computer-controlled plotters apparently date back to 1953, but the online source for that is iffy. The Atlas Missile Guidance Computer had some, which would be around 1957. Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer had plotters, but that was mechanical, not electronic.
Sketchpad, on the MIT TX-2, was the beginning of what we'd recognize today as interactive graphics.
There were many early military systems. The USAF really wanted graphic displays. Preferably big ones. SAGE, the Iconorama, and other triumphs of money over the problem followed.
By the late 1960s, most of the typesetting companies had some kind of phototypesetting machine. Fonts were typically on glass disks and printed onto photographic paper by firing a strobe lamp at the right time. The next stage was using a stroke-writing CRT to draw the characters. Usually the CRTs for these were about one line high but a page wide. Harris-Intertype had that approach working before 1970, long before Metafont.
The font problem in that era was "given this outline, fill it in with minimal stroke movement". Strokes had a width, so you had the usual problem of machine tools - all inside corners are rounded. If the beam is too small, it takes too many strokes to do the fill, and if it's too big, there's too much corner rounding. I knew of a program called Procrustes which did that job for the Harris-Intertype Phototronic around 1970.
Do you count differential analyzers as computers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser
If so, then yes.
IIRC, some of the input devices to such machines were x/y "pointer" tables - imagine a flatbed plotter, where you moved the part where the pen would go, in order to input cartesian coordinates (or a continuous value I suppose, composed of x/y values?)...
Prior to oscilloscopes (but after differential analysers) - the Williams Tube was used as a memory system. It could be considered a form of bitmap display, except you'd have to only use it in a dark room (and no camera flashes, dammit!):
Before plotters or oscilloscopes, there were harmonic oscillators which could perform Fourier transforms and the reverse operation and print the result on a piece of paper. It's a vector device too, albeit a mechanical one, not digital or even electronic.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0INsTTU1k2UYO9Mck-i5...