I grew up in the 90s. My dad would tell me about the plotters they had at work. I remember many of the old dos programs from that era would have plotters listed

I grew up in the 90s. My dad would tell me about the plotters they had at work. I remember many of the old dos programs from that era would have plotters listed in their printer options. (Anyone remember Banner Mania?) I never actually saw a plotter in person though. We just had an ink jet at home and lasers at school. This is a pretty amazing post though. I never knew how plotters worked, or even realized how elegant their protocol was. A lot of people talk about how kids will never appreciate x, y, z today. I remember in high school when a friend of ours got his first CD burner, a 16x. We had been struggling with 2x/4x burners (I even had an old SCSI burner). We were both like, "You will never appreciate that." That's why posts like this are so important. I think a lot of people growing up will appreciate learning what technology was like; seeing simulations of old BBSes on 9600 bps modems. Sure, they'll never have that feeling we did of dialing BBS after BBS and downloading shareware, typing on FIDO net or photo copying our parent's drivers license so we could download dial-up porn, but if it's well written about -- it's still something we can pass down to the next generation of engineers about the way things were and how far we've come.