Dad was a polymath. He used pen plotters to map out his VLSI designs in the 1980s and taught VLSI at CIT in Melbourne. I remember as a kid watching the magic as the diagram unfolded on A3 paper. I also remember my grandmother bought a four colour plotter for her home pc (Oric Atmos I think). She put herself through business systems in the 70s at night school, too. Probably enough genes there to get me into software dev :)

(Edit for Atom to Atmos - twas a long time ago)