The Death of the Draftsman

I am of the generation of CAD users that is entirely digital, having no experience with bluelines or hand drafted sets.

And even now the industry is still changing. The old (for me) standard was obtaining reprographics from a full service supplier, signing a contract, leasing large format plotters, monthly delivery of toner, on-call maintenance.

My favorite plotter was an Océ and I think that company died? My last office was reliant on an Océ plotter which had a Windows Forms GUI app running on a never-updated embedded Windows XP. A perfect use case for embedded Linux but I guess it either predates embedded Linux or corporate offices at the time preferred embedded Windows.

Now we don't even print drawings.

I enjoyed the article because it is written by a stereotypical draftsman. While we all write in paragraphs, draftsman have some self-taught logic which results in this confusing blog format with random quotations, italicized sentences, arbitrary mix of heading styles, self-invented acronyms. Every draftsman I ever met 1. knew better than everyone 2. Knew you were always wrong 3. eternally pissed off.