The Adler steam locomotive (1835) drawn by a 1980's Roland DXY-1150 pen plotter, a rather hectic looking and sounding fellow.
The Adler ("Eagle") was a German steam locomotive built to order in 1835 by the British railway pioneers George and Robert Stephenson at a cost of 1750 pounds sterling. It was delivered to the Bavarian Ludwigsbahn (Bayerische Ludwigsbahn) which ran 7.45 kilometre long between Nuremberg and Fürth. After running successfully for over twenty years the locomotive was scrapped in 1857.
The Roland DXY-1150 pen plotter is a popular computer printing device from the 1980's for printing vector graphics. It prints by moving a pen across the surface of a piece of paper, much like a human hand does. This means it is restricted to line art. To be able to draw all sorts of shapes the pen needs to be able to move across the paper on an X and Y axis. The Roland line of pen plotters have a specific design where the paper is fixed and the pen moves along both the X and Y axis in all directions. This is different from the HP line of plotters where the pen only moves along one axis and the paper along the other. The drawing pen is mounted on a carriage that moves back and forth. These smaller "home-use" plotters were popular for desktop business graphics and in engineering laboratories for technical drawings. Starting from the mid-1990's pen plotters were gradually replaced by high-resolution inkjet and laser printers. Surviving pen plotters have often been converted to venyl sign cutters.
