14 Jul
2003
14 Jul
'03
12:31 p.m.
Sellam wrote:
... SIZE has been written to work with a GP-7
Grafbar Sonic Digitizer, manufactured
by Science Accessories Corporation, 970 Kings Highway West, Southport ...
biochem.otago.ac.nz/resource/gsize_doc.html - 33k - Cached
<http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:xcKrL5E0pMAJ:biochem.otago.ac.nz/resource/gsize_doc.html+%22sonic+digitizer%22+%22science+accessories%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8>
- Similar pages
</search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=related:biochem.otago.ac.nz/resource/gsize_doc.html>
Mike
In the late 1970s, AT&T's Bell Labs invented
the "electronic blackboard".
It was basically a digitizing tablet that allowed one to draw and transmit
images.
Might anyone know where one exists? How about similar
products prior to
December 1979? When was the first digitizing tablet invented?
This is research I'm conducting for a client, so
any useful leads will be
compensated.
Thanks!
I know we had a graphics tablet at the Bioengineering Program at the University
of Missouri in 1975. It was a GrafPen Model (SP?). It consisted of two arrays of
microphones along the x and y axis of a plexiglas tablet.
MMMMMMMMMMMM
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
There was a spark gap pen that generated a click and the microphones could locate the
point on the tablet. It could be flipped right or left handed because your hand/arm
could block the sound from the microphones. It had a digital readout of the x and y
coordinates.
There was also a serial interface which we connected to our PDP-11/20. We placed the
tablet over a illuminated light box with a chest radiograph on it and then we able to
outline the
margins of the human heart on the film. The data was used in a project to compute the
shape of the heart and attempt to catagorize the type of congenital heart defect.
I used it to place boxes on the film to look at pulmonary vascularity.
You could imput points in a point by point mode or constant input mode. You could then
scale the points to be displayed on a graphics display such as a RAMTEK system. We
normally
would draw and display on top of the digitized film image to make sure we were registered
correctly.
There were lots of work related and fun related stuff the Grad students used to system
for.
There was a 3-dimensional model available later.
References found online:
Grafpen GP-7 sonic digitiser, manufactured by Science Accessory Corporation.
1968 - Science Accessories Corporation (later SAC) releases sonic digitizer.
GSIZE/SIZE documentation <http://biochem.otago.ac.nz/resource/gsize_doc.html