Comics with an Electronics Theme
June 1972 Popular Electronics

June 1972 Popular Electronics Table of Contents Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Popular Electronics, published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.

Close out this day with a tech-themed comic from a 1972 issue of Popular Electronics magazine (only one this time). Those of you who entered the engineering realm sometime after the 1990s might not recognize the strange looking surface the guy is sitting behind. It was an early tabletop touch-type display where the stylus with which the user created an image (drawing) was a wooden stick with a round shaft of graphite located coaxially in the center. The pointed, relatively soft tip wore down rather quickly and required frequent reshaping to maintain a constant pixel width in the lines. Portions of drawings made on those devices could only be erased and redrawn a few times as with modern solid-state drives. Cutting and pasting required physical cutting and pasting (or taping). Clipboards were often used to hold frequently replicated snippets of renderings (title blocks, standard drawing notes, etc.) for pasting into a drawing. One big drawback of those older drawing programs was that after a day's work you usually went home with a layer of graphite on your palm and shirtsleeve.

Comics with an Electronics Theme

June 1972 Popular Electronics Comic (p45)

Posted February 27, 2024
(updated from original post on 8/16/2017)