When I started doing the office end of this business c.1989 it was typical to have a non-networked DOS computer, a single 13" or 14" monochrome monitor, dot matrix printer, and pen plotter. When you wanted to transfer something from one guy in the office to another you copied it to a floppy and walked it over. When you wanted to print or plot something you literally took the cable off the back of the computer of the last guy to use it and plugged it into yours. Printing a coordinate list on the dot matrix was 5-10 minutes. Plotting even a simple drawing took 20 minutes, and up to an hour was common. Frequently a pen would skip or the paper would slip and the process needed to be restarted. And since there was no color on the screen it was virtually impossible to keep track of layers and line weights by what you saw there. Regular check plots where a necessity. And while you were plotting or printing your computer was fully engaged in just that, no multitasking was possible.?ÿ ?ÿ
So a typical work day for the CAD draftsman consisted of working on the drawing for an hour and half or so, then 10 minutes of setting up to plot, followed by 20 minutes to an hour of watching the plotter do its thing, drinking coffee, calling the wife, walking around outside, reading Professional Surveyor, etc. etc., and generally not focused on a computer screen. In an 8 hour day you might repeat this cycle 3 or 4 times. So there was 2 or 3 hours of goof off time in the Survey CAD techs day, but nobody considered it goof off time.
And, frankly, CAD took over the drafting world under those circumstances because it was considered highly productive.
Today prints are shooting out of the printer/plotter before you can walk over to it. Those built in breaks are gone. And yet for brain health they must exist. It really isn't realistic to expect a person to focus on this work for 8 - 10 hours. You may keep a person in their seat facing the screen, not surfing the net, but instead you will just get them zoned out (or writing long posts to RPLStoday)for a certain percentage of the time. It is not a reflection on their work ethic. It's just how humans work.?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ
?ÿ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ
That was normal and it was a common necessity to have more than one computer to keep up with the field crews or have an overstaffed office of people waiting on a peripheral to finish one test before beginning another.
I was lucky enough to have a secretary that refused to use her computer and kept her daisywheel electric for all her work and commandeered use of it to do cogo and word processing on other projects while my unit was plotting.
Much of the time I had projects where I shared a remote office with the client's legal staff and they had these word processing units that reminded me of the old arcade games. It was like a wall bookshelf unit with monitor and keyboard builtin and a dozen or more diskettes to load every morning just to get everything up and running and a box load of floppy files of templates and user files and older files to keep up with. Once they would get a stack of forms filled out they would hit a button and the printer would start printing out pages after pages during coffee breaks and lunch. Many days they would leave a junior assistant in the office after all the rest had gone home for the day to oversee the equipment while they continued to printout paperwork and shut everything down afterward and lockup.
I still have some parallel cables and some with round connectors around from those days.
About 20yrs ago I carried my 3 sons thru a building during the State Fair in Dallas, Tx where they had a computer and electronics museum and it was so weird that I had used so much of that equipment when it was the latest and greatest thing to have and had in storage a couple of things not on display.
I, also, was occasionally able to take advantage of otherwise idle equipment. But it wasn't commonly available. A common gambit was to plan a plotting session to run during lunch and at the end of the day.
The greater point of my story is how there were regular and extended breaks built into the work flow, and we still managed to get quite a lot done. It is my contention that about 4 hours a day of actual, focused, CAD work is about all you can expect out of a human operator. Stories I've heard from old pen and ink draftsmen suggest that their actual productive time was likely even less.
Many days they would leave a junior assistant in the office after all the rest had gone home for the day to oversee the equipment while they continued to printout paperwork and shut everything down afterward and lockup.
Yup, those were the days.?ÿ I worked for an office?ÿ 20 man (five field crews) civil firm making its name doing large subdivision development/infrastructure and the shop IT was Tektronix color dumb terminals driven by a VAX(PDP?) mainframe running VANGO engineering software with two CalComp flatbed ink pen mylar plotters and a rack of four reel to reel tape drives for backup/storage.?ÿ The junior assistant would handle the CalComps concerning ink supply, mylar mounting, job queueing, tape mounting, etc. till about midnight, then go home.?ÿ The reel tape backup system required tape reel switching every 4-6 hours overnight so because I lived next door from the shop I'd have to get up about 3:00am every work night (including Fridays) and switch the backup tapes.?ÿ It was an amazingly productive environment for engineers/surveyors in the dawn of commercial level big iron computing.
In about?ÿ 1973 or 1974 I worked in a group that had a computer with 8 kilobytes of RAM and ran at 0.1 MHz. The unit was in an aircraft equipment style box and used for nav or such. We used it to control radios. Like you, I later saw that model in a museum.
And we put men on the moon using slide rules.
And we put men on the moon using slide rules.
Maybe for some things, but there was a lot of mainframe computer time also.?ÿ A huge list of orbits and trajectories had to be pre-calculated and they did near-real-time small deltas from the pre-computed orbits because it took too long to compute when they needed a change.
about 1970 the Civil Engineering firm my Dad worked for had a computer for aerial photogrammetry. He took me across the hall to see it, so excited, but then I saw it, what a letdown, all I remember is a white metal box about the size of a washing machine.
Dad also had a Marchand Figurematic, wish I had that machine today.
My first computer was an Apple II with 4kb ram from Government Surplus in 1982.
It came with AppleWriter.
