{"id":762,"date":"2011-04-25T13:55:54","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T18:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=762"},"modified":"2011-04-25T14:16:42","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T19:16:42","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-apple-ii-digitizer-tablet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/762\/retro-scan-of-the-week-apple-ii-digitizer-tablet","title":{"rendered":"<span id=\"retro_color\">[ Retro Scan of the Week ]<\/span> Apple II Digitizer Tablet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/talos_digikitizer_large.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/talos_digikitizer_small.jpg\" alt=\"Talos Digi-Kit-Izer Digikitizer Ad - Byte 1979\" class=\"centered\"\/><\/a><span class=\"freecaption\"><em>The Talos Digi-Kit-Izer digitizer tablet<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Digitizer tablets were a  popular way of digitizing graphical information in the 1970s and 1980s &#8212; an era before cheap <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/377\" target=\"_blank\">optical scanners<\/a> (and the memory to store those scanned images) became available.<\/p>\n<p>To use a digitizer, you would place an image you wanted &#8220;digitized&#8221; (translated into the computer) onto the tablet and mark the key points of the illustration with a special stylus or cursor (a handheld mouse-like device with a small targeting window) hooked to a computer.  Through this process, the stylus\/tablet combination would interpret the spacial relationship between the points you marked into a series of graphical dots on the computer screen.  Those dots, in turn, could be turned into a 2D computer image (think connect-the-dots) if desired.<\/p>\n<p>With some tablets, it was also possible to trace lines of an illustration with continuous strokes of the stylus.  These tablets evolved into the modern <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wacom.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Wacom-style<\/a> graphics tablet we know today.<\/p>\n<p><center><em>[ From Byte Magazine, November 1979, p.31 ]<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n<p><strong>Discussion Topic of the Week:<\/strong> Have you ever used a graphics tablet (of any kind)?  Tell us about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Talos Digi-Kit-Izer digitizer tablet Digitizer tablets were a popular way of digitizing graphical information in the 1970s and 1980s &#8212; an era before cheap optical scanners (and the memory to store those scanned images) became available. To use a digitizer, you would place an image you wanted &#8220;digitized&#8221; (translated into the computer) onto the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,27,26,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-info-and-history","category-regular_features","category-retro-scan-of-the-week","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}