Who's got the oldest signmaking computer?

[Dave Drane]

I got my first Gerber 4A in early 1985. Serial # 5646..I still use it occasionaly for cutting Scotchlite and sandblast rubber and for making pounce patterns. I have it set up with a Cadlink Fastboard which allows it to run through signlab.Fonts at that time were $500.

 

[SignosaurusRex]

I remember those......our first...$10,000 with 1 font (Helvetica Medium) and the fonts were $350.00 each. A friend of mine had one of the first Gerbers. I don't recall which one it was but I do remember another predecessor to the 4b, a Gerber 3 I believe it was...huge font cartridges! Traded the 4b in on Anagraph 3.2 when it came out, I just pulled out and dusted off one of the first Anagraph systems (Anagraph Classic) only to look it over for old time sake and to pitch it in the garbage. I think it had 16mb ram and the monitor was a 13" monochrome.

 

[jona]

A 4 you say

That does sound old , but they don't give up without a fight do they , I still run a 4B with signboard
and its perfect for small vinyl cut jobs that don't require printing that i use on store displays , I have been able to find new belts and such so I'd expect I will never totally retire it ,,

 

[TheSnowman]

Do you mean oldest one that you can still fire up and use easily, or oldest as in, it's sat in the corner for years, and probably wouldn't fire up, and more like, catch on fire?

 

[SignosaurusRex]

do you mean oldest one that you can still fire up and use easily, or oldest as in, it's sat in the corner for years, and probably wouldn't fire up, and more like, catch on fire?

 

[Fitch]

I have a Roland PNC1200. Purchased in 1994.

Only cutter I have owned, runs almost everyday, and cuts everything, as well as pen plots for pounces.

Only ever replaced blades, cutting strip.

This thing just doesnt stop and could probably still get close to what I paid for it.

Cheers - G

 

[Dave Drane]

That does sound old , but they don't give up without a fight do they , I still run a 4B with signboard
and its perfect for small vinyl cut jobs that don't require printing that i use on store displays , I have been able to find new belts and such so I'd expect I will never totally retire it ,,

As my luck would have it I think the 4B came out about a month after I bought mine. I replaced a belt about 2 years ago. I could not bear to part with it, so I did not tade it up. I tell people that it would be akin to selling one's child!
I don't use it much but it is still here with about 2 dozen fonts which never get used. I did sell the design station though, when I bought a scanner.
It may make it to a museum one day.

 

[Pat Whatley]

Tossed out a Macintosh 2SE a couple of months ago that we made screen printing positives on. We'd upgraded it from 1mb of ram to 2mb for about $500.

 

[Jillbeans]

I still have some Letraset scraps, does that count?
And a 4B and 4E up under my bed, just stopped using the 4E in November but I plan to bring it back out for pounce patterns.
Love....Jill

 

[petrosgraphics]

jill,

you shook up a couple of cobwebs in my head when you said letraset..

had to look in my storage area, aka, attic to find it, no luck yet.. but found

2 4Bs... when you think of the money we all spent on these..... at that

time, you could not believe what gerber had done for the sign industry....

 

[Just Another Sign Guy]

yes there was a gerber III around 1983 and if memory serves me correctly it seems like the IV was released almost immediately after. i donated one of each for a museum display. i remember jumping from those machines to my first roland and being simply mesmerized.

 

[killergraphics]

Dog gone it
I was sure this would have been me.
Early 85, Mac SE, TI 15" congental knife plotter and Vital Draw software.
A cool 15k
Boy ain't life easier now.

 

[amy s.]

I got my first Gerber 4A in early 1985. Serial # 5646..I still use it occasionaly for cutting Scotchlite and sandblast rubber and for making pounce patterns. I have it set up with a Cadlink Fastboard which allows it to run through signlab.Fonts at that time were $500.

Dave, I have one too for sandblast mask. Do you know what my settings would be since I'm now trying to hook it up to run with FlexiStarter 8.6? I can get the Gerber but don't know what other setting is....something HPGL? Someone said GS since it is a slower running maching. I'm so incredibly stuck here.

Oh, I have a cad link in mine and the old dongle from when i had it hooked up to my desktop is still on the line.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Si Allen]

Giday Davo ......... I see a water tank beside it ... is it steam driven?


:ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

 

[Billct2]

I recall working at Morgan Sign in the early 80s and I thought we bought the first Gerber sold in CT, or at least the first one sold by Glantz in Ct. Don't recall whether it was a 3 or 4. Do remember it was $10k. We did a lot of work with that machine.
I still have a Gerber Super Sprint as a back up.

 

[round man]

Amy,..thermazone is the parent company for cadlink and signlab ,...I know because the dongle number on my old dos based version of signlab (thermazone cadlink 1.1) was number 15,....it came on one floppy and there was a simple homemade binder for a manual and dongle also in the envelope,...in flexi there is a thermazone hpgl option for a driver for the gerber link card to hook the old 4b's up to a pc,...there sere several other boards made over the years so you need to choose a driver that matches your link module card,..lmk was another if I remember correctly,.......

 

[Sign Works]

I've got an old 486 with a lightning fast 1 meg of RAM, installed is a DOS based version of Casmate Pro (ver.1 I believe). The program came on a box full of floppies, about a dozen or so. Also installed is an even older sign program, Auto Cad or something like that, came on the old 5" floppy floppies which I still have. This state of the art system is fitted with a monsterous 13" monitor along with a grayscale flatbed scanner and an Ioline Studio 7 Plotter (what a tank that thing was). The amazing thing is that system works flawlessly without any bugs whatsoever, never experienced a crash or freezeup. What you don't want to know is what all that cost back in it's day.

 

[Dave Drane]

Does anyone remember HTD. That was a dog of a program!! I only bought it because it came with a number of fonts and it had a huge big noisy box just to drive the Gerber plotter. They were one of the first companies to go to the wall.

 

[yahhoo]

i recall the Gerber 3b...it had a clumsy looking slider on the knife mechanism to control the weight...of course soon after the 4b had a pretty little weight set. hehe. yes the roland systems blew it away...never got sucked in to gerber again...still a crappy scanner was $1200 hahaha....and then of course there were no scanner drivers for win 95 ...ah...all those buggy microsoft versions...
gawd i love my graphtec...watching other cutters, makes me hink of life i can never get back etc...
anyone still have an Atari?

 

[SignosaurusRex]

yes there was a gerber III around 1983 and if memory serves me correctly it seems like the IV was released almost immediately after. i donated one of each for a museum display. i remember jumping from those machines to my first roland and being simply mesmerized.

I don't remember for sure what year it was, I think '82 with that Gerber III.....my buddy definitely made a boat load of money selling vinyl letters (mostly Helvetica) all over the country...long before internet marketing. He was on the cutting edge at the time and made enough to build his dream home and shop on the river he loved to fish as well as buy his first drift boat, all while living, working and hand lettering signs in an old horse barn not big enough to park a car.