I am working overtime and am alone on the floor so there’s nobody i can ask about this. We have workmen moving around shifting furniture. One of them has just gone by pushing something which looks like nothing so much as a piano :eek:
Well i puzzled for a moment but i couldn’t figure out why on earth my company would need a piano. Upon investigating, i discovered that it was placed near where our printers are and it has the Hewlitt Packard logo on. I can’t seem to work out any other identifiers other than it’s big (about 5 feet long, 2 feet wide and 4 feet tall) and has a coffin-style part where you’d expect the strings to be housed on a piano. And it has a wide roller underneath. And looks like a piano (obviously).
It was Hewlett-Packard’s revolutionary “PC” released in 1979. Designed to blend in with the furniture of a typical American living room, it nevertheless had over 100 Kilobytes of memory capacity.
It looks about as big as some of the industrial ones but it’s somehow…different…
Definitely more piano-like.
It must be some sort of magic printing gizmo but i can’t work out what we’d use it for. Unless to print out 5 foot wide sheets of paper but if we needed those we’d normally just print A4 stuff and tape em together. Not that we are an organisation that **needs ** to print 5 foot wide bits of paper with any regularity. We just happened to think it would be funky to have a detailed map of London on the wall.
This is going to bug me all night now. I’ll have to come in early to poke a manager on the head and point questioningly at it. (Point at the piano-thing, not the manager).
Yes those were the industrial ones i looked at before. It’s not any of them. In fact i’m fairly sure the one second from the bottom is a knitting machine.
Wax color printer
Mechanical Drawing ink pen plotter.
Mechanical Drawing inkjet plotter.
Mechanical Drawing toner plotter.
Old Amonnia developer Blue print copier.
All the above that used a continous tear off sheet would have a roll storage area to feed the machine.
What’s the model number.
What type of interface.
There was a scrappy note taped to the wall nearby saying sumpin about plotters. I initially ignored it cos we have lots of scrappy notes taped to the wall in that area.
Mystery the First solved!!!
Now i just have to work out what a plotter is and why we need one and whether or not my cocktail dress is back from the drycleaners.
A plotter is a computer outout device that draws big graphics, like building plans or wiring diagrams. It uses colored pens on paper or plastic film that’s often 4 or 5 feet wide & as long as needed. Very cool indeed, but not of much use in a conventional office.
Well, given that it was a plotter, perhaps “The Spy Who Loved Me” might be the more appropriate choice!
But thanks for the laugh. Did anyone besides me get struck by the vision of Eve doing exactly that when they read the above post?
I have to say the whole ‘plotter’ thing passed me by. I just associated the word more with ‘planning’ and assumed somebody was hatching some sort of scheme.
It is starting to make a little bit of sense now. We are not that conventional an office. I still haven’t worked out what we are going to be using it for though. And i’m pissed about the lack of ambient music to accompany our work.
