KA10: Calcomp plotter

[larsbrinkhoff]

ITS uses hardware device 654. It's not documented, but I reverse engineered it. See comments starting from PDP-10/its#1862 (comment)

[larsbrinkhoff]

I believe WAITS (aka SYSTEM) has support for a Calcomp plotter too, possibly the same model. CC @bgbaumgart

[larsbrinkhoff]

@markpizz, any news on the SIMH plotter API?

[bgbaumgart]

Mark Pizz Cc: Lars, Rich = I know of No progress on implementing the Cal Comp plotter for SIMH or SIMS as of now (8 April 2020). For an exact model, It would be placed on the PDP6 I/O bus as the Paper Tape Punch ( I believe there was a physical kludge toggle switch mounted near the punch to select PTP or PLT) The UUO manual mentions PLT as mode 100 only dump-words but only send low order 8 bits to the Cal Comp, which encoded pen up, pen down, move step +/- X and +/- Y. From the SAILDART Archive I will gather some of the easy to find Cal Comp software ( from SUDS people areas) and make it available at a URL to be announced. = Bruce Baumgart SAILON #2 Stanford Operating Note #2 ( which is missing ) Explained the plotter subroutines which still exist in [PLT,RPH] Bill Weiher and RPH Richard P. Helliwell as well as myself were the last to use the plotter Before everything got better by sending SUDS plots to III for the FR80 Or using the XGP printer to do plotting.

On 7 Apr 2020, at 11:56 PM, Lars Brinkhoff ***@***.***> wrote: @markpizz <https://github.com/markpizz>, any news on the SIMH plotter API? — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#207 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAGBIBUACAPDWC3AKQ7JM5DRLQN3HANCNFSM4MDV4SNA>.

Three scraps of Cal Comp paper from 1969 at SAIL. Sample plot of Feynman diagrams and Formulae which I did for Tony Hearn’s Reduce I can not recall seeing the plotter after 1969. Mention of the plotter disappears from the hardware manual in 1975.

[markpizz]

I'm interested one or many volunteers to run with the generic potter emulation problem. Once that exists, it would seem somewhat easy to implement any of the relatively simple plotter or plotter like devices that were potentially connected to any of the simulators that simh currently supports.

Without an approach like this, everyone who comes along and wants to implement a plotter, has to not only deal with the interface details to the particular simulator, but has to come up with a data model that can somehow be presented in a system today. So far, folks have produced intermediate files which can be viewed after the fact by some type of viewer, This approach doesn't really model how plotters actually worked or were used on real systems. Users could see the results of their efforts as the plotted results were produced however slowly that actually happened.