Industrial Art Gallery

One day in about 1997, I was poking around in a mostly uninteresting used bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sifting aimlessly through books in the sciences section, when I stumbled on a bland-looking old Book with the title Engineering Descriptive Geometry. The books around it had straightforward titles (Geology, etc.), but I drew a complete blank when I tried to imagine what "engineering descriptive geometry" would refer to. I opened the Book and found out: "engineering descriptive geometry" means manually doing everything that is now done by CAD programs on computers. It's plans and blueprints -- not of buildings, but of machine parts.

  thanks to 12.s

I was a drafter "on the board" between 1965 and 1979 at the Boeing Company. I was really good at descriptive geometry. In 1979 they brought a strange new contraption in. They put it into it's own air conditioned room. Four terminals for a 2D CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing) system. I got on the system as soon as I could and never looked back. I really appreciate a well done hand drawn mechanical drawing. I would as much want to go back to the board as to go back in a darkroom. I'm just a digital kind of guy. But part of me misses laying down a good line. It's a lost art.