OMG
This is where I started!!!!
The company I originally started with at the heady age of 17 was heavily investing into Gerber products. The company that marketed them here in the UK was Spandex.
We would get all the upgrades like an additional box on top that held fonts and outline cards. Also was one of the first with a digitser linked through I think an apple
computer. If you wanted a letterstyle that you didn't have you could rent them from Spandex for a day or a week! They would post you the cartridge and when finished with you posted it back!!
I can remember a huge job with lots of small repetative text that we set up to cut over the weekend. We pressed cut on Friday at 5.30pm, came in on Monday at 8.00am and it was still cutting! It eventually finished I think about 3.00pm Monday!!!!!
This wall all set up on a Red LED screen about 2" x 1/4" !!!
Looking back, I reckon I could cut the same amount of lettering now in about a couple of hours.
We had all sorts of stuff that was tested on us. I think we had every Gerber machine that was available. We even had to try out some complete flops such as plotter blades which were made of plastic/acrylic.
Oh how technology has came on.
Good times though with some absolute stunning hardware which at the time was litterally cutting edge.
SC