anyone remember the Gerber 4b

[ProSignTN]

The kids these days with all the printing. Gerber changed the world of signs more than any other single machine.

 

[LizKeenan]

I came into the sign industry in 2021 so I was surrounded by all these punched 14" inch rolls. I thought Gerber was a thing of the past until recently. I went down the rabbit hole and found out the machines used to be EVEN MORE difficult to set up. It is incredible seeing the transition machines to modern roll to roll though. There is also some cool stuff you can do with those foils, plus the red is always lovely.

 

[Scootershooter]

If you are 63 then you were 21 in 1984. Just a whipper-snapper!

....and 9 when in the Air Force!

 

[netsol]

and

 

[netsol]

and THE GREYS WERE ALWAYS GREY!
unless you did composite colors

 

[Oz Signs]

I started with one of those gizmos back before the pc was invented. You could never really set up a job easily as there was no screen with it, just a red led info area. Doing the easiest of jobs took time but still faster than hand painting in some cases. The cost of this baby was $17,000....each font was $300 - 400.00 each. I then remember saving up to buy a digitizing tablet. $13,000 and you could redraw logos by taking artwork and blowing it up and then taping it to the tablet and using a mouse to digitize the graphic. OMG the computer it came with was an Apple 2e and I had purchased an accelerator card to speed up the redraws on my monochrome screen. Doing the simplest of logos was time consuming and in most cases we had to redraw all the fonts as they were not available or just not worth buying. I then purchased the job save program and that made things a lot better as you could save projects and recall them when needed. After that I bought a scrappy which hooked onto the Gerber 4B and allowed you to put scrap material through to save a few bucks. We then moved up to a Gerber Sprint and loaded it with 26 fonts....$35,000. We were really moving now. Twice as fast as the 4b and it came with a monochrome screen for layouts. The pc's were just coming out and then Signlab appeared and we put a fast card into the Gerber Sprint and that allowed us to set projects up in Signlab and cut through the Sprint. That was a major development for us. The signlab back then was nothing like we have now but was eons ahead of the Gerber Sprint setup. Oh the old days lol.

I remember our boss spending $30,000 australian for one of those. We all were mid term apprentices in the mid 80's.
Swore we would never give up the brushes but several months later all jockeying for a office seat