Drafting Tables

Drafting Table used to be a requisite tool of the engineering profession. I had one in my office all my working life as an engineer. It outlasted the slide rule by more than a decade. We had drafting as a discipline during our IIT days and had to do mechanical design work using drafting tables.

Even as a logic designer, I had to produce the final version of my work on a drafting table. My startup days at Excelan predated CAE/CAD tools. I did all my design work by hand on the drafting table using templates. I had complete tool set including mechanical pensils, verious templates, staedler erasures.

We had to make blue prints of our original vellums to do dowstream work but all the changes had to be made on the original vellums. My original Ethernet Board designed for Multibus was hand wired, using the hand-done netlists, using hand wire-wrap tool by Duane Murray. As a matter of fact Duane hand wired three boards needed to have a network of three computers.

Our intial success came when a plethora of startup doing engineering workstations for CAE/CAD work needed networking to connect to back end minicomputers.

All the logic design work moved CAE workstations by late eighties. All the error prone hand work also got automated. As a result, drafting tables, like slide rules before them, went the way of dodo bird.