I'm always amazed when (or how) an article of mine shows up here. I suspect it came about through this twitter exchange regarding a mystery device that came with someone's Calcomp plotter: https://twitter.com/artandtech/status/1387838582149287939
What I could never adequately explain is just how nicely made these digitizing sights are. They give a very bright, crisply magnified image of the point immediately under the pen position. This contrasts with how massively fiddly it is to try to operate exactly the right buttons on a pen plotter while squinting down a tiny optical sight.
Even though pen plotters weren't rare in the 1980s and early 1990s, I've never found any software (beyond the terrible script I wrote for that article) that uses this capability. There's probably some HP BASIC code lurking on a half-forgotten instrumentation archive that does the job, though.
What I could never adequately explain is just how nicely made these digitizing sights are. They give a very bright, crisply magnified image of the point immediately under the pen position. This contrasts with how massively fiddly it is to try to operate exactly the right buttons on a pen plotter while squinting down a tiny optical sight.
Even though pen plotters weren't rare in the 1980s and early 1990s, I've never found any software (beyond the terrible script I wrote for that article) that uses this capability. There's probably some HP BASIC code lurking on a half-forgotten instrumentation archive that does the job, though.