New AutoCAD Museum Forum

[lrm]

On 3/26/2019 at 5:45 PM, BIGAL said:

I had a neighbour who was into electronics, he built a !@#$% reader for us that talked to our NEC PC thats a colour twin 8" disk back in the late 70's we were ahead of our time. Then took the data and loaded into excel.

 

I don't think it was Excel you loaded the data to in the late 70's, perhaps Lotus 1-2-3

 

Per wikipediea

"Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982. Multiplan became very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987."

[Paul Li]

Back in the early 90s I had this letter size digitizer tablet by Calcomp called the WIZ. 

I was able to reduce the typical 12x12 AutoCAD digitizer tablet menu and map it on.

Major advantages of this over the typical larger tablets being sold at the time was it's a lot smaller and light weight and cost less too. But after AutoCAD dropped support for DOS and went all out with running on Windows, Calcomp also dropped support for the WIZ and I had to give it up to go with a mouse.

I actually wrote about this awhile back in an article I called "What Happened To The Digitizer?"