Digital plotter DXY-1100, Roland Digital Group, with charger and spare parts.

The DXY-1100 is a type of pen plotter – an expensive, highly-engineered and high-precision drawing and draughting machines that used computers in place for draughtsmen/women to draw crisp line drawings on regular paper with incredible speed and precision. Introduced in the 1970s and 1980s, they could be used by architects and engineers to draw blueprints, or to produce colourful charts on transparencies to present on overhead projectors. By the 1990s, they were replaced by laser and inkjet printers although there remains a niche market for people who ‘hack’ pen plotters to connect and be used with modern computers.