Having successfully shipped the first few Sweepniks, the academics saw an opportunity to build other devices using similar laser-beams and mirrors. The first of these was the High Resolution Display No.1 (HRD-1), which instead of reading images from film was able to write images onto film. The film could either be postcard-sized ‘diazo’ for permanent hardcopy or be a photochromic film projected onto a screen to give a large display of a metre across.

The HRD-1 lived up to its name. Even today, a modern workstation screen is capable of reaching 1000 addressable lines of pixels, whereas the HRD-1 had 140,000 by 100,000 addressable points. Even allowing for the fact that the light spot was 10 times bigger than the addressability, this was still 10,000 lines resolution. The HRD-1 remains to this day as one of the very few computer displays in the world on which a complete map can be drawn to scale and the detail can be seen without zooming in and out.

The HRD-1 was exhibited at graphics shows and two market areas expressed an interest. One was Digital Mapping, then in its infancy. The other was the security printing industry, including the design and printing of bank notes and bonds. Of the two, the security printing industry wanted to write its own software and just bought Laser-Scan hardware. Around a third of the banknotes in the world were designed using Laser-Scan hardware, including the British notes.

The HRD-1 used a powerful argon ion laser cooled by water and, pulling 30 amps on three phase electricity to produce about 300 milliwatts of beautiful turquoise light, focussed into a spot about 10 microns across. This spot could either draw on photochromic film to produce the image for the screen, or by swinging a mirror out of the way, could draw on diazo film to produce postcard-sized hardcopy.

The HRD-1 at the Experimental Cartographic Unit (ECU) was the third one built. It was driven by a DEC PDP-9 minicomputer. In fact, it was not very mini, as it filled two bays each about 4 metres long by two metres high. The PDP-9 had 16K words of core memory (real magnetic cores – no chips yet) with an 18-bit word length, able to store three 6-bit characters per word. This is in the days before the 8-bit byte had been invented.

Laser-Scan provided no applications software with the HRD-1. The main software that was provided was an interface library called LDLIB which had been written by a researcher at Cambridge University called Peter Woodsford. He had been a member of Cambridge University’s CAD Group, where he developed the pioneering GINO graphics package (which is still in widespread use world-wide). Since joining Laser-Scan in 1975, Woodsford held a series of technical, managerial and directorial positions before becoming Deputy Chairman of the company in 1990.

Building on its success, Laser-Scan operated from premises behind the CAD Centre on Madingley Road, Cambridge. The pre-delivery trials and training were held there with a party of three researchers from ECU headed by Dr. Les Thorpe, an independent consultant working at UK Hydrographic office.

In addition, the ECU HRD-1 acted as a reference point for Laser-Scan. Within two years another HRD-1 had been sold for digital mapping – this time to Rijk Waater Staadt (RWS) in Holland. RWS asked Laser-Scan to write map editing software to drive the HRD-1, which instigated a new area of expertise for the company – (and out of which, a spatial software company was later born). Over time ‘Mapping’ became an important market for Laser-Scan and LAMPS software has been used by many of the major national mapping agencies around the world.

In 1975, following on from its success with the Sweepnik and HRD-1, Laser-Scan received a request from a major military agency in Britain. Having seen the Sweepnik following lines and the HRD-1 drawing maps, the agency asked Laser-Scan if they could produce a line-following digitiser for maps.

The result was originally called the HRD-1 Digitising Option, secondly, the FASTRAK and finally the Lasertrak.

The task of writing the software for map data capture was much harder than originally envisaged because of a problem in pattern recognition. However, after several false starts, acceptable software was developed, which used very different algorithms to any other automatic digitising systems. These line-following algorithms have outlived the original expectations of the developers, and were used until recently in Laser-Scan’s VTRAK products.

In 1983, the console of FASTRAK was re-engineered for better ergonomics and appearance and the software had major new capabilities added for Junction Recognition. The resultant new automatic digitising system was launched in the ACSM show in the USA as the Lasertrak.

The transition from Lasertrak to VTRAK occurred in around 1987 when the costs of raster scanners and computer workstations fell to a level where it was more cost effective to implement the line-following software on commodity hardware than to produce and maintain the expensive and delicate Laser-Scan Lasertrak hardware.

The first production map editor for the HRD-1 had been written in 1975, and was called SOLADI. It also ran on the FASTRAK and Lasertrak machines, as these were a superset of an HRD-1. Various customers liked it, but wanted to use their Lasertraks just for digitising, so Laser-Scan was asked to make its map editing software available on commodity hardware. Computer workstations had not yet been invented, but Tektronix had recently produced the Tek4014 storage tube display. SOLADI was made available on a workstation based around the Tek display, in a product called Interactive Graphical Editing System (IGES).

In 1979 the Laser-Scan mapping software was moved from the PDP-11 computers to the new DEC VAX range under the VMS operating system. This allowed us to enhance the functionality and the new suite became known as LAMPS (Laser-Scan Automated Map Processing System), with the main editing component called LITES (Laser-Scan InTeractive Editing System).

In 1985, another military contract allowed Laser-Scan to do a major re-implementation of LITES and the plotting and representation components of LAMPS. The new editor was called LITES2, and is still in use at many sites worldwide.

Building on the same laser deflection technology used in the HRD-1 and Lasertrak, Laser-Scan built other kinds of computer output devices.

The Laserplot in 1985 was a precision plotter drawing on film of nearly A3 size. This could then be photographically enlarged to produce A0 films.

The MLP-1 was a similar machine, but drew on 35mm microfilm and was sold mostly to engineering CAD installations.

In May 2000, Laser-Scan was taken over by Yeoman PLC. The purchase of Laser-Scan enabled Yeoman to develop the new market of personal navigation, arising from the anticipated convergence of electronic positioning and mobile telephones. A group from the Laser-Scan software development team were transferred to a new company ‘Yeoman Navigation’ and built the first commercial service providing car navigation instructions direct to the mobile phone. Initially known as VoxNav, this was later renamed TravelM8.

The Yeoman takeover instigated a new management team, and a new focus, but continued to support the traditional Laser-Scan customer base of National Mapping Agencies and security printing systems.

The Yeoman group soon ran into financial difficulties and in 2003 placed Laser-Scan into administration as insolvent. The administrators accepted a buy-out by the management.

For many years the company had two clear areas of business (hardware and software development) and by 2005 it was decided to separate the hardware side of the business into a new company called Laser-Scan Engineering Ltd. This company now had a clear mandate to develop further the hardware business which was borne of Laser-Scan’s original hardware manufacturing activities. It was clear that there was a demand for these specialist support services and rather than going into terminal decline at the end of its era of hardware manufacturing this group was thriving and had sufficient prospects to stand alone in its own right going forward.

This enthusiastic group of individuals was made up of former members of Laser-Scan’s support and development teams and had for some years been successfully selling their skills to provide global support and the occasional specialist product to high-end, high-tech clients and end users in the security printing and cartographic industries.

The software side of the company now focussed on spatial data quality tools for Oracle database and in 2007, changed its name to 1Spatial to reflect this focus.

In 2008 in response from a request to take over support of high-end computer to plate systems in America from the Swiss company Lüscher, Laser-Scan Engineering registered Laser-Scan International Inc in America. This new business drew on the experience of its parent Laser-Scan Engineering to provide an effective support structure for Lüscher’s American customers.

In 2010 Laser-Scan Engineering Ltd and its subsidiary Laser-Scan International Inc were purchased from 1Spatial by its management and some of its staff.