ellysbro

A long time ago, in a computer language class, I wrote a program that enabled me to digitize a drawing into a file which could then be manipulated and plotted. It was a low priced plotter, but it could be interrogated to return its current position to the computer. The drawing was placed on the plotter bed, and a stylus with a tiny lightbeam was mounted in place of the plotter pen. Using the manual controls of the plotter, I could position the light stylus over a point, and the plotter could transmit its x-y position to the computer.

For example, you could tell the program, from a menu, that the element being digitized was a straight line. It then asked you to move the stylus to one end of the line and press enter. Then it asked for the other end of the line. After both ends were entered, it would store the line in the file for that drawing, as simply the end points x-y coordinates. Circles were stored as the center and radius, and so on. Text had to be entered from the keyboard. It did a good job of digitizing a simple drawing, and then plotting a duplicate from the stored file. I never went beyond that point (pun), but I can see how one could manipulate the data for scaling the drawing. The good thing is that the plots of the scaled drawing file could be with whatever line width you selected.

I got an "A", and later wrote progams for training a teaching robot and also for finding a star with my telescope. I have always been fascinated with controlling machines with a computer. Perhaps this ties in somehow with my love of remote control.