CalComp
More info
- Released
- 1958
- Type
- Company
The company that sold the world's first commercial digital plotter, and whose FORTRAN subroutines became the de facto way to draw from a computer.
California Computer Products was founded in Anaheim in 1958 and shipped the model 565 the following year — a drum plotter that stepped the paper back and forth in hundredths of an inch while the pen moved sideways. It was rarely wired to the computer directly; instead the mainframe wrote a tape of pen movements and the plotter chewed through it at its own pace. Drawings, curves and maps could come out of a machine rather than a drafting room.
The lasting contribution turned out to be software. The subroutine library — PLOT, AXIS, SYMBOL, NUMBER — spread so widely that rival plotter makers shipped CalComp-compatible libraries for decades, an early lesson in the interface outliving the hardware. Sanders Associates bought the company in 1980, it eventually landed under Lockheed, and the plotter business was shut down in 1999.