gloriouscowThis is it. This is what it was all for. All the penposting. The hundreds of dollars of irresponsible eBay purchases.
For this moment.
And it was all worth it.
also can we just appreciate how good smartphone cameras are. this is like a 4 year old samsung phone
this isn't even pro mode or anything i just clicked the zoomy thingy.
This is my first FTG pen to arrive, the FT-411. This model is not listed on FTG's website - I assume it was a budget model specifically made for a company called KidBoard, which made an eponymous edutainment digitizer tablet. They partnered with FTG for a brief foray into lightpens around 1998.
Unlike all of FTG's other pens, the barrel of this pen is plastic, which is cheap and kind of sucks, but at least the barrel is a nice sort of sparkly blue.
The pinout of this pen is - whether by happy accident or deliberate industry cooperation - identical to my Warp Speed pen. I can plug it into the same adapter and use it on the Tandy too. Neat.
You can see the lens assembly here inside the tip switch. The whole tip of it clicks inwards, with the lens moving as you click. There is about 1.5mm of travel.
I have another of FTG's professional series pens in stainless steel on its way - I do not even want to tell you how much I paid for it.
That's probably it for my FTG pen collection - I think FTG really dropped the ball here. They kept the same pen pinout over the entire lifetime of the company, only adding a single optional second button later on.
Once you had a FTG pen you could just upgrade your light pen card as you upgraded your video card - how is FTG not extracting maximum profit by forcing you to buy a new pen each time??? No wonder they went out of business.
Well that and their entire product category going extinct due to the LCD. But besides that.
donated this image to Wikimedia!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_light_pen_in_use_on_a_CGA_monitor.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_light_pen_in_use_on_a_CGA_monitor.jpg
