question: Why didn't vector graphic become mainstream rather than raster/pixel?
comment: The hardware that will ultimately display or print your work is pixel-based. This means that any vector-based solution requires additional processing before it can be used. This can also mean additional storage/transmission costs. Consider a CGI animated film. Handling it in pixel-based formed is somewhat expensive in terms of storage/transmission/processing. But it's completely prohibitive if you're working vector-based - you'd need a server farm and dedicated fiber to get anywhere near real-time.
passages: Some Hewlett-Packard pen plotters had two-axis pen carriers and stationery paper (plot size was limited). However, the moving-paper H-P plotters had grit wheels (akin to machine-shop grinding wheels) which, on the first pass, indented the paper surface, and collectively maintained registration.
  
  Present-day vector graphic files such as engineering drawings are typically printed as bitmaps, after vector-to-raster conversion.
   Subsequent vector graphics systems, most of which iterated through dynamically modifiable stored lists of drawing instructions, include the IBM 2250, Imlac PDS-1, and DEC GT40. There was a home gaming system that used vector graphics called Vectrex as well as various arcade games like "Asteroids", "Space Wars" and many cinematronics titles such as "Rip-Off", and "Tail Gunner" using vector monitors. Storage scope displays, such as the Tektronix 4014, could display vector images but not modify them without first erasing the display.
   Section::::Overview.
  
  One of the first uses of vector graphic displays was the US SAGE air defense system. Vector graphics systems were retired from the U.S. en route air traffic control in 1999, and are likely still in use in military and specialized systems. Vector graphics were also used on the TX-2 at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory by computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland to run his program Sketchpad in 1963.
   Vector displays were good for showing data charts, modifying line drawings and CAD diagrams, tumbling 3-D wire-frame shapes, editing text, laying out printed pages, and playing simple games. But they did not handle colors, images, filled-in areas, black-on-white screens, or WYSIWYG fidelity to the fonts of professionally printed text.
   Section::::Usage in 2D graphical user interfaces.
  
  As most computer monitors become more and more high resolution, everything displayed would be smaller. However, if the screen resolution were turned down, everything would appear pixelated. Thus, resolution independence is currently being designed to solve this problem. With raster graphics, all icons need to be extremely high resolution, so as to not appear pixelated on higher resolution screens. This may take up enormous amounts of memory, and hard disk space. If vector graphics were used instead, it could be easily scalable and never lose data nor appear pixelated.
   Vector formats are not always appropriate in graphics work and also have numerous disadvantages. For example, devices such as cameras and scanners produce essentially continuous-tone raster graphics that are impractical to convert into vectors, and so for this type of work, an image editor will operate on the pixels rather than on drawing objects defined by mathematical expressions. Comprehensive graphics tools will combine images from vector and raster sources, and may provide editing tools for both, since some parts of an image could come from a camera source, and others could have been drawn using vector tools.
   Vector graphics can be created in a form using a pen plotter, a special type of printer that uses a series of ballpoint and felt-tip pens on a servo-driven mount that moves horizontally across the paper, with the plotter moving the paper back and forth through its paper path for vertical movement. Although a typical plot might easily require a few thousand paper motions, back and forth, the paper doesn't slip. In a tiny roll-fed plotter made by Alps in Japan, teeth on thin sprockets indented the paper near its edges on the first pass and maintained registration on subsequent passes.
   The different nature of raster programs over a vector-plotted approach gives some vexel images a unique appearance when compared with traditional rasterized vector graphics. However, the increased flexibility comes with a loss of image scalability for print media, which vector artwork retains. To compensate for this, most vexels are created at very high resolution.
   Another programmer had been given a set of 3D points of the XM1 tank design and was writing code to output it to a Calcomp plotter. He asked Muuss if they could get it displayed on the VG terminals instead, so they could rotate it. He first output it as a static image on a Tektronix 4014, but the next night managed to get the display onto the VG3D where it could be easily spun around using the internal vector hardware.
   The Golden Age also saw developers experimenting with vector displays, which produced crisp lines that couldn't be duplicated by raster displays. A few of these vector games became great hits, such as 1979's "Asteroids", 1980's "Battlezone" and "Tempest" and 1983's "Star Wars" from Atari. However, vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies due to the high cost of repairing vector displays.
   Vector art is ideal for printing since the art is made from a series of mathematical curves, it will print very crisply even when resized. For instance, one can print a vector logo on a small sheet of copy paper, and then enlarge the same vector logo to billboard size and keep the same crisp quality. A low-resolution raster graphic would blur or pixelate excessively if it were enlarged from business card size to billboard size. (The precise resolution of a raster graphic necessary for high-quality results depends on the viewing distance; e.g., a billboard may still appear to be of high quality even at low resolution if the viewing distance is great enough.)
   Standard Gerber supports only the simple imaging operators that a vector plotter is capable of - drawing tracks and flashing apertures. The only way to create large copper pours with a vector plotter is to "paint" (aka "stroke" or "vector-fill") them with a vast number of tracks. Painting was also used to create all but the simplest pads because of the cost of creating a corresponding physical aperture. Painting results in very large files that take long time to process. It creates the intended image but the original shape of the copper pour or pad and must be laboriously recovered in CAM.
   Modern vector graphics displays can sometimes be found at laser light shows, where two fast-moving X-Y mirrors position the beam to rapidly draw shapes and text as straight and curved strokes on a screen.
   In 1986, Adobe Systems introduced Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, allowing home computer users the first opportunity to manipulate vector art in a GUI. This made the higher-resolution vector art possible and in 1987 T/Maker published the first vector-based clip art images made with Illustrator, despite widespread unfamiliarity with the bezier curves required to edit vector art. However, graphic designers and many consumers quickly realized the enormous advantages of vector art, and T/Maker's clip art became the gold standard of the industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1994, T/Maker was sold to Deluxe Corp and then two years later to its main rival, Broderbund.
   In contrast to similar terminals from other vendors, the Vector General systems included little internal memory. Instead, they stored vectors on the host computer's memory and accessed them via direct memory access (DMA). Fully equipped VG3D terminals ran at about $31,000 including a low-end PDP-11 computer, compared to machines like the IBM 2250 which cost $100,000 for just the terminal.
  
  Among a number of famous uses known within the computer graphics field, it was a VG3D terminal connected to a PDP-11/45 that was used to produce the "attacking the Death Star will not be easy" animations in "Star Wars".
  
  Section::::Description.
   Vector displays were used for head-up displays in fighter aircraft because of the brighter displays that can be achieved by moving the electron beam more slowly across the phosphors. Brightness is critical in this application because the display must be clearly visible to the pilot in direct sunlight.
  
  Vector monitors were also used by some late-1970s to mid-1980s arcade games such as "Asteroids", "Tempest", and "Star Wars". Atari used the term "Quadrascan" to describe the technology when used in their video game arcades.
   The reason that most of these systems succeeded in just those years, not earlier or later, and within a short timespan had to do with the arrival of commercial hardware that was powerful enough. Two things were needed and arrived at about the same time. First, electron density maps are large and require either a computer with at least a 24-bit address space or a combination of a computer with a lesser 16-bit address space plus several years to overcome the difficulties of an address space that is smaller than the data. The second arrival was that of interactive computer graphics displays that were fast enough to display electron-density maps, whose contour circles require the display of numerous short vectors. The first such displays were the Vector General Series 3 and the Evans and Sutherland Picture System 2, MultiPicture System, and PS-300.
   Dot matrix printers also introduced the ability to print raster graphics. The graphics were interpreted by the computer and sent as a series of dots to the printer using a series of escape sequences. These printer control languages varied from printer to printer, requiring program authors to create numerous drivers.
  
  Vector graphics printing was left to special-purpose devices, called plotters. Almost all plotters shared a common command language, HPGL, but were of limited use for anything other than printing graphics. In addition, they tended to be expensive and slow, and thus rare.
  
  Section::::Use in printing.:PostScript printing.
   Section::::Description.:Hardware.
  
  A common attempt in the late 1960s to improve performance of graphics display, especially in 3D, was to use special terminals that held a list of vectors in internal memory and then used hardware or software running in the display controller to provide basic transformations like rotation and scaling. As these transformations were relatively simple, they could be implemented in the terminal for relatively low cost, and thereby avoid spending time on the host CPU to perform these operations. Systems performing at least some of these operations included the IDI, Adage, and Imlac PDS-1. 
   Vector monitor
  
  A vector monitor or vector display is a display device used for computer graphics up through the 1970s. It is a type of CRT, similar to that of an early oscilloscope. In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics. The electron beam follows an arbitrary path tracing the connected sloped lines, rather than following the same horizontal raster path for all images. The beam skips over dark areas of the image without visiting their points.
   Vector Graphic
  
  Vector Graphic was an early microcomputer company founded in 1976, the same year as Apple Computer, during the pre-IBM PC era, along with the NorthStar Horizon, IMSAI, and MITS Altair.
  
  Section::::History.
   Vector Graphic computers had many innovations, such as the Flashwriter integrated video and keyboard controller. Vector Graphic was known for their Memorite word processing application. When combined with the Flashwriter, the Vector Graphic Memorite software gave low-cost word processing capability, which had previously only been available with dedicated word processors.
  
  As of 2007, Vector Graphic still had a small but active user community.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Corona Data Systems - founded in 1982 by Robert Harp
  
  Section::::Further reading.
  
  BULLET::::- Vector Graphic S-100 Documentation and Tech Info. By Herbert R. Johnson
   In 1970, at the UK Farnborough Air show, Sperry Gyroscope (Bracknell, England) exhibited the first ever vector graphic video display from a UK company. It featured an analogue monochrome display with special electronics, designed by Sperry's John Atkins,  allowing it to draw vectors on screen between two pairs of coordinates. In the USA at MIT in 1963 Dr Ivan Sutherland had used similar techniques for his Sketchpad program. At Farnborough the display was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the new Sperry 1412 military computer - it was shown running software that drew, in real time, a wire-frame rotating cube that could be speed-controlled in any of its three dimensions. That demonstration created significant interest in the Sperry 1412 computer, which then went on to be at the heart of a number of major projects for the French Navy and the Royal Navy during the period 1972 to 1992.
   If we regard typographic characters as images, then the same considerations that we have made for graphics apply even to the composition of written text for printing (typesetting). Older character sets were stored as bitmaps. Therefore, to achieve maximum print quality they had to be used at a given resolution only; these font formats are said to be non-scalable. High-quality typography is nowadays based on character drawings (fonts) which are typically stored as vector graphics, and as such are scalable to any size. Examples of these vector formats for characters are Postscript fonts and TrueType fonts.
  
  Section::::Operation.
   The next major change in graphic arts came when the personal computer was invented in the twentieth century. Powerful computer software enables artists to manipulate images in a much faster and simpler way than the skills of board artists prior to the 1990s. With quick calculations, computers easily recolor, scale, rotate, and rearrange images if the programs are known.
  
raw_presuppositions: Vector graphic is superior to raster/pixel. Vector graphic is superior to raster/pixel.
raw_corrections: Vector graphic requires additional processing compared to pixel based work. Vector graphic requires additional processing compared to pixel based work.