Life Before the Invention of AutoCAD: Photos from 1950 to 1980

My father is a retired mechanical engineer. He learned drafting with pencil and paper first; when he was 19 he drew some of the parachutes for the Apollo project. When I was a kid I saw that he even had a drafting table with all the accoutrements at home: templates, triangles, compasses, French curves, mechanical pencils and an electric eraser. (A handheld device with a powerful motor that spun a cylinder of eraser rubber; touching the spinning cylinder to the paper let you erase with blinding speed.)

He was an early adopter of AutoCAD when it came out, but in later years he would grouse about it. From his perspective, AutoCAD was merely a better pencil, but it wasn't better enough to justify the cumbersome user interface; it wasn't until the debut of Inventor that Autodesk released a tool that works the way an engineer thinks. When Inventor came out he got back into drafting and engineering work again on a contract basis in his 70s. His old-school expertise combined with his embrace of new technology made him a powerhouse on the team. Everyone looked up to him, even the fresh-out-of-college kids.

Drafting was taught in my high school through the late 1980’s, and into college in the second half of the 80’s. However, in 1986, we had CadKey for the IBM PC, which could work with an optional mouse. The students who could afford a mouse had an edge.

Drafting by hand is a lost art. It was fun - annoying when you made a mistake using .5mm HB lead and had to scrub the snot out of the paper to fix it - but something very real to it all

The article should be titled "Life Before the Invention of CAD." There were lots of CAD applications before AutoCAD, and plenty since, as well.