The HP 7470 was a small low-cost desktop pen

plotter A plotter is a machine that produces vector graphics drawings. Plotters draw lines on paper using a pen, or in some applications, use a knife to cut a material like vinyl or leather. In the latter case, they are sometimes known as a cutting pl ...

introduced by

Hewlett Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

division in 1982. It was the first small-format plot that moved the paper, rather than the pens. It used a revolutionary "grit wheel" design which moved the paper held in place by a wheel with embedded grit and a pinch roller. The HP 7470 had two pens, one on either side and plotted on ANSI A (8.5 x 11 inch) or A4-sized paper. It was much less expensive than the previous flatbed design. It was very heavy but had 4 pens. The HP 7475 used a rotating carousel with six pens. That plotter was used in greeting card kiosks. This design was also scaled up for very large pen plotters. These were driven by the

HP-GL HP-GL, short for Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language and often written as HPGL, is a printer control language created by Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP-GL was the primary printer control language used by HP plotters. It was introduced with the plotteHP-89 ...

plotter language which used

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

commands such as PA 300, 4500;PD;. The plotter had three electrical interfaces:

HP-IB IEEE 488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification developed by Hewlett-Packard as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). It subsequently became the subject of several standards, and ...

RS-232 In telecommunications, RS-232 or Recommended Standard 232 is a standard originally introduced in 1960 for serial communication transmission of data. It formally defines signals connecting between a ''DTE'' (''data terminal equipment'') such a ...

, and

HP-IL The HP-IL (''Hewlett-Packard Interface Loop''), was a short-range interconnection bus or network introduced by Hewlett-Packard in the early 1980s. It enabled many devices such as printers, plotters, displays, storage devices (floppy disk drives ...

for HP handheld calculators. Pen plotters became obsolete with the adoption of

ink-jet printer Inkjet printing is a type of computer printing that recreates a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto paper and plastic substrates. Inkjet printers were the most commonly used type of printer in 2008, and range from small inexpens ...

s, and processors fast enough to

rasterize In computer graphics, rasterisation (British English) or rasterization (American English) is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (a series of pixels, dots or lines, whic ...

complex images. Houston Instrument and other manufacturers would follow with similar plotters.

References

External links

HP 7470A Operators manual

HP article on the engineering of the 7470A
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hp 7470 Pen plotters 7470