[cr4ig_]

One of my favorite "dead tech" memories is from when I worked as a CAD operator for an engineering firm in the late 1980s, where we had a half-dozen AutoCAD workstations and a Roland pen plotter that used a large roll (several hundred feet long) of feed paper. In AutoCAD, you could sometimes fat-finger your work and kick a drawn entity way out into coordinate space without noticing it. As such you always needed to do a zoom extents every so often (and definitely before plotting it) to make sure you didn't have your own little Nemesis object lurking out in the dark.

My co-worker neglected to do this one time and casually sent the document to the plotter to be drawn. When the plotter reached the entity way out in coordinate space, you heard the click-thunk of switching pens and then a high pitched whine as the plotter started rapidly spooling out paper to draw it. I've never seen anyone move so fast as he dove to reach the plotter power switch before all the paper scrolled off the spool and onto the floor.

Plotters were state of the art back then but they have pretty much disappeared without a trace. I think the technology has been somewhat repurposed to make vinyl sign cutters, they are basically a plotter with a cutting blade attached instead of a pen.