HP CAD Digitizer - 9111A Graphics Tablet 

the matte texture on the back of the plastic sheet is so that any paper underneath will show up clearer. using a plastic sheet that's glossy on both sides would cause very subtle viewing issues at certain angles with certain lighting from reflections off of the back surface.

I'm 53 and I remember visiting my dad's shipyard in South America back in 1980 (when I was 10) and getting amazed watching a Calcomp CAD/CAM system; it was basically a supersized version of your setup, all scaled up to design, print and manufacture huge metal ship parts.Great video of vintage tech that was cutting edge back in the day.

24:44 I could be wrong, but it is also possible that BASIC line is immediately tokenized as soon as you hit enter, and the “formatted” looking code is actually result of BASIC interpreting tokens back to human-readable code. Storing BASIC code as tokens instead of text would make sense, given that software of that era had to save as much memory as possible.

The reason for the pen to have actual ink in it is probably to help seeing what points have been digitized already. The glossy side of the overlay can most likely be cleaned with water after having finished digitizing.

I'm a "Tech Designer" (drafter) and I love this old CAD stuff! I got started in the early 2000s, way after digitizer tablets, but worked with a lot of people who used them back in the day over the years. Great stuff, would love to see more.

I commend the HP Engineers' intrepid campaign for a "beep-boop computer" future by placing sound chips and speakers into every device.

I used an '80s digitizer tablet at a job, but instead of a pen it had a "cursor". It was called a "cursor" but it looked like a corded mouse with a clear plastic cross hair, and you could see a coil of wire embedded in the clear plastic. (It also had 16 buttons on the mouse, in a typical '80s ergonomics disaster). It was very accurate to the cross hair. But also, for someone used to using '80s ball mice, it felt so smooth! Like smooth jazz kind of smooth! Loved it!

What seems a lifetime ago (1989) when I started my almost 30 year stint in the marine electronics industry, I spent hours and hours sitting in front of a Graphtec digitizer tracing marine charts into a primitive JRC chart plotter (NWU-52A). You had to define two points on the chart with latitude and longitude and then you could trace along the coastline. You could also add symbols and change the colors. This was before the days of commercially available electronic charts. Some of the original JRC chart plotters were indeed pen plotters that would actually mark a paper chart with your ships position from the positioning equipment of the day... Loran, Omega, Transit SatNav. How things have changed!

I really like this retro CAD stuff And fr shoutouts to the seller for hooking you up after the damage

Great to see those predecessors of graphics tablets. The earliest I've used were wacom tablets in the mid/late 90s and later Intuos. Now I'm working with cintiqs- what an amazing journey.

THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS!!!!!!!

Next step, storing the points drawn in an array as they're digitized. Then you can save the image in "vector" format by storing the array, print it in vector format on the plotter by switching outputs and re-playing the array draw, and even add deletion and the like by manipulating the array in ram to remove entries, or inserting "pen up" and "pen down" commands to convert a drawn line into a "blank" line, then blanking and re-drawing the new array. Of course, that's getting rather advanced. :D

i lñove how all of these HP products that connect to their computers are very smartly designed and its not just a simple input device or whatnot, amazing as usual

Been a draftsman for over 25 yrs now... I used to see a digitizer like this in some dusty corner around the office once in a while, but I never saw one in-use professionally. And I've drafted in old DOS versions of AutoCAD, and learned to draft by hand on paper.

It's crazy how this setup cost over $20000 in '80-'81, but less than 5 years later you could buy an AT with something like AutoCad and a plotter for like 10k, and get better performance and more standardization, not to mention the computer was useful for way more stuff if you wanted.

i been really enjoying the whole saga of HP stuff, really interesting, your enthusiasm about getting stuff running and doing actual fun stuff with it is contagious! thanks for the videos

Found your channel a few weeks ago and been binge watching them, thanks man!

Awesome to see this old stuff working. You're really documenting/preserving history, this is very helpful. It would be really cool to see the old CAD

The part where you walk through the code and modify it was super interesting

I remember interfacing a giant HP plotter (took 3 foot wide sheets, maybe even 4) to a 386 running AutoCAD 11 in grade 10. This stuff was already ancient in 1997, but it was the last time I used a plotter. Nice to see one here being used again, the clacking and whirring brought back some interesting memories I hadn't thought about in over a quarter century ;)

Hello. First professional Mechanical CAD system I was working with in 1992 was HP’s ME-10, which ran on series 300 workstation. Software itself relies heavy on digitizer, which was part of the system. I used HP46088A (which is some kind of successor to 9111A). IMHO it was one of the best 2D CAD solutions of the time but was extremely costly if purchased in bundle with HP hardware. Kind regards from Slovenia Jože

Don’t take this the wrong way, but as someone from the olden days it is fun seeing someone with no CAD background trying to make sense of this old hardware. I started my career with the city sewerage and water supply authority. They had about 100 years worth of drawings which needed to be converted to CAD. There was a large department full of guys with large (probably A0) digitisers methodically working through the thousands of drawings. Meanwhile, we were next door designing more infrastructure using manual drafting. I suppose CAD was still in its infancy and there were probably no CAD operators outside the digitisation project. One small thing though. I can’t think of any reason to go directly from digitiser to plotter. Fun, but ultimately rather silly. And pen plotters were a pain in the arse to use in real life. We were so happy when their replacement came along.

This is the kind of content I love: Seeing things I knew of but never got to play with.

this has quickly become my favourite retro tech channel

That pen trick or whatever is so neat, I miss all the little hidden things electronics would hide, especially on something portable to allow you to do things you never knew it even did or sometimes like a tool or something built right in that you find after it broke or something and realize it was meant to help you and right under your fingertips the whole time lol .... I keep forgetting how darn good this channel is ... I'll end up overlooking something because it's a normal title and a great thumbnail, but not click-bait or anything so then I'll finally click one and immediately binge on a few and love your videos! 🍻🌎❤️🌮🖥️

I don't think I've commented on any of your vids yet but have logged a few now... I wanted to say this a an amazing system and looks like a lot of fun. Thank you for the vids you make and keep up the good work!!!

That was quite awesome to seen all rhis working. Quite the effort to get it working. The basic program for this was so simple, lovely programmers interface.

I remember a cad tablet from the 386 days that used a weird 'mouse' that had a transparent circle above the buttons with a copper wire coil around it and 2 wires in an X pattern which it used to determine where on the tablet that pointer was. It also came with printed 'button' sheets and the entire layout of that sheet had to be programmed/loaded into Autocad using LISP language I think it was. Then you had to click 2 anchor points to calibrate the tablet vs autocad and it would be very accurate after that.

Intreasting my grandpa was head of the I think president (dont remeber could be sales) for a HP CAD program. Its cool to see it in use.

Love your setup there Dude, that is one cool looking machine.

Another great video from you, really found this one fun! Thanks for showing your Basic coding process & getting this old Hardware working again =D

Technology back then was so interesting, just like equipment design. They had a kind of cool charm; all that space age vibe i think.

I used to work with similar tables, ours had a mouse with a cross-hair on the front for more precision. the buttons where like tools menus - what you have today on the screen. The CAD software came with overlays you put under the matt, with the appropriate tools and menus etc.

I installed quite a few of these when I worked with Ford. Glossy side up, to prevent drag from the ball point. As I remember, there was a specific sized ball point refill just for their digitizers. Something about the ball size being "compatible" with the plastic and not letting it get marred with ink. The concept was that you took notes on paper with the pen and jumped right onto the tablet, saving time. Most got installed with a solid metal rod, instead of a refill, though I think this was just a Ford thing. Also, RARELY did we trace anything on the tablets. What we DID do was have someone like me sit down with the lead CAD person on a project and create a "tablet template". This consisted of a paper template (held in place with a small piece of sticky tape in the four corners before placing the protector back on) and a "command file". The command file was a CAD template that simply translated a specific area's tap with a software macro. SImply put, it let the lead CAD guy setup all the specific fasteners and screws on a paper template. After loading the paper and software templates, all you had to do was click a specific fastener and BOOM, the CAD brought it in from the library. Shortly after I started there, the software template could be linked to the CAD file and would automatically load all needed softwares. This also allow the engineers to change a screw size and propagate the change without having to re-write the template. Change the paper overlay and change the part number in the catalog. VOILA, CAD accepted the changes and everyone was on the same page and BOL sheet.

I owned an 11” 1992 version of this as my art tablet back in the 2000s. It had an apple serial plug and i used it on my ancient upgraded powermac to paint in photoshop and sometimes to play games. It had the mouse with the clear tracing reticle. It was pretty ingenious and i enjoyed it. Simple, fun times.

It's probably not that weird that it formats when you move to a new line. It's probably just parsing the line and then re-printing the result of the parsing. If spaces aren't important they'll get ignored by the parser and not show up when it prints.

As a mechanical engineer who uses AutoCAD and Revit daily, I'd really like to see what the actual CAD software looked like back then.

I believe that this was delivered in a set with Hewlett Packard's CAD software (ME--5, ME-10 or ME-30 which had 3D) but it was running on 9000 series of Unix workstations

Shelby, I love you so. I truly do. But it's HP-IB. You're the only one I've ever heard refer to it as H-Pibb. It's not a soda. But what if it were? Love your interest and enthusiasm with Hewlett Packard stuff. I still have my HP-71B with the ThinkJet printer, disk drive, cassette recorder, RS232 interface, video interface, ROM cartridges and magnetic strip reader as well as the same HP monitor you have! It all uses HP-IL to connect together. I remember using it with a modem back when to BBS, it was a pain in the ass typing on that tiny calculator keyboard.

I went from the drafting table to a ComputerVvision CADDS3 mainframe system in 1980 with a huge combination digitize/menu pad. I had to stick with the digitize pen going forward, as the puck/mouse felt like trying to draw with a bar of soap. A professor once told me, "Whatever you trained on is "Mother"...", and I found that to be true for many users, some of whom swore by the puck. I learned to be a UNIX system administrator when the ComputerVision system moved off their mainframe to Sun server/workstations. Still had to load 9-track tapes for daily/weekly/monthly backups. Yep, I'm old... ;-P

Time to start learning how to store vector coordinates to disk/file and reading them back to plot them to either the screen or plotter output

When I was in HS in the mid 90's we had a CAD/CAM setup similar to this donated to the school's Industrial arts program. We were basically STEM before STEM. We did mostly hand drafting, but occasionally were able to use the CAD setup.

It is a great deal when you repair hardware and connect the devices correctly and write software to digitize. This machine is quite ahead of its time. It can replace AutoCAD Lite.

I worked with a company that was using a tablet for an electronic CAD program in the late '80's-- I don't recall if it was an HP or not, but it also had an electronic pickup. The guys wanted a new electronic component menu for the cad program, instead of the one that came with the unit, so they printed a newe one out on the plotter. Didn't work at all -- results of clicks were all over the map. Finally found out the plotter ink was conductive. IIRC, the resistor SYMBOL was about 2Kohms. Tis radiated the contact position all over hte nearby area.

The ink is so you can draw on paper and see where you have made your marks without looking at the screen cursor.

That would be awesome for some astronomy geek lab in 1985. We could digitize photos and make all sort of notes on the printouts. Cool program to synchronize it with a plotter. Nice work.

Really impressive

Something that'd be good for QoL with that program would to make it automatically go back to the main mode after moving to a different spot.

Reminds me of what i used with a Targa card back in the day 😊

awesome stuff I would love to know a real world example where this tech was actually used

would love to see more

I wish I had known you were into Graphics tablets. I had 2 Kurta GTX digitizer tablets with the mouse type of device I recycled recently.

Omg you use KDE!! My favorite DE!

2:50 My first Wacom tablet, the Intuos 1, had buttons along here. I never used them because my eyes were always on the screen.

I wonder how complicated it would be for real time transfer to the plotter like you theorized in the very beginning of the video... Pen moving the plotter in real time and only drawing when you press down.

I'd guess the ink is there in case you wanted to draw from a blank page directly on the digitizer or maybe so you could track what's already been retraced without looking at the screen?

wow i had one of these. you could get a blank for the pen as mine had that in the box but my preticular one had a cross hair mouse like thing attached to it and i didnt have the actuial pin. it did work but via serial in my case it had the hp conector wich i had no idea what to do with at the time.

I believe the pen has ink so that if you wanted to draw on paper while perhaps creating a technical sketch.

I wanted to learn this and went to college. Quickly gave up, and then designed all the plans for my factories with a sheet of drafting film, pencil and ruler ! Total waste of time trying to learn this and use it !

This is totally above a Koala Pad. What a gem.

- Does that digitizer have a puck? - Do you have a drum-plotter or a flat-bed-plotter? - I'd love to get all of the things I used back in the day for the nostalgia, but then again, I have too much stuff as it is, including plenty of stuff I wouldn't use and just have _only_ for the nostalgia. I wonder if people like Shelby consider what will happen with their collections once they're gone. 🤔

Probably a lot of software sold through HP consulting and pretty sure all of that wasn't commercially distributed, and if the customer company didn't care, they didn't preserve it.

On the subject of old hp stuff, can anyone tell me what a hp cart 4722b was used for?

IDK how but im thinking that the same one my school had in 2002 and I used it for autocad.

that glass isopropyl jar you have is really cool, is there a name for that?

The Coleco Adan was the evil twin brother of the Coleco Adam.

What’s the shipping transit like over there? Is mail sent via monster truck?

Did you change the printer you use to print the list at the end?

Man, people talk about computing being a wild west in the 80's and 90's The 70's seems to be "Ok user so now write your own software to interface with the hardware" I'm a developer by trade and I find that daunting

You should've got some basic dot to dot puzzles. They would've been perfect to demonstrate the plotting.

Bentley Microstation cad software was used with these in early 1990's. It may have been Unix based. Maybe Bentley can offer some information.

could the beep be modulated by x,y? that would make a sweet synth thingie

How much did this cost when it was new ? probably more than the buildings that where designed on it.

Que preciosidad

I'm having flashbacks to Logo Writer.

Holy Dell, this is so rare.

I have access to HP ME10. Not sure it is compatible with your hardware though.

I had a huge HP pen plotter i tossed like 10 years ago - it just took up a huge amount of space, and finding working pens for it was getting too expensive for a toy to play with. Now I kinda regret that.

Yooo what is that little alcohol dispenser?

I think you can say that the LEDs are 'frenched' into the tablet.

Whats up with the alcohol pump jar? I assume it's some sort of fountain pen accessory but what is it called cause I wanna get one!

Cuando HP aun molaba

Great demo. 👍

In the end you need the software to make it do more than what you can do by trying in code

Dumb question but have you thought about contacting HP to see if they still have archives of the software for the system?

I'm waiting to see you build an adapter and play Osu! with it.... :P

That case has definite CoCo vibes.

I suppose the ink in the pen would be there so the designer could see what he is drawing like he was drawing on paper. The plastic film was either meant to be washable or replacable once the drawing was complete. **I think**

I had a Summer Graphics tablet about 20yrs ago for use with AutoCAD. Cost me $400 new but ended up selling it on eBay for $30 because I had no drivers for Windows XP. 🙁

I would guess that this pen may never have had any ink and they have pickt it because a small ball rolls better than just a pointy tip slides along.

The ink tank is designed to be empty, the conductive properties of the METAL tank makes the connection between the tablet and the wire. Additionally, the use of what is, in its native environment, a regular consumable ensures that there are no proprietary refills like today's plastic nib tablet pens, which keeps the tablet working no matter what and regardless of the company's future manufacturing.

Can this be connected to a modern PC to be used in a modern cad/art program

❤❤❤

Дома то же лежит дигитайзер hp такой же только питается от внешнего блока питания. И в комплекте кроме стилуса лежит указатель курсора с кнопками нечто похожее на мышь с стеклом и перекрестьем в нем. На dip переключатели выставил работать в качестве мыша дигитайзер и подключил к компьютеру через переходник usb-rs232

hp computer museum has.... Application Software Name: AutoCAD for 150 Associated Hardware: HP-150 Introduced: 1985 Product Number: 47956A Media: 3.5 inch SS/DD Teledisk: 2.16 if this is any use to you

You could rename your channel to nostalgia hoarding 😂

Have you won one one one?

Paper backup :-)

I mean, that's super cool, but... Can it run Doom? 🤔

That's the real tablet