What good is an HP plotter?

[Hans Brueggemann]

fwiw,
i use my 7475A occasionally to draw data from some multimeters, which requires the instruments to run on a 24/7 basis for a week or so. being a bit picky on energy cost, my controller of choice is an HP-71B (instead of PC or laptop) in conjunction with a 82169A to talk to the instruments, and a 82164A to talk to the plotter. of course, normal pens would wreak havoc on the paper because of all the "pecking", so i opted for a quick hack to modify a plotter pen into a plotter pencil. see pictures. the automatic pencil i used for the mod is a ROTRING TIKKY 0.5 mm, using B type mines (2B or 6 B should actually work much better, but i didn't test them yet). i pretty much prefer the easiness of programming just a couple of lines of BASIC codes vs. the excel VBA, python, or (name your favourite language here) coding.