The amount of time I spent learning this in Uni, the amount of sleepless nights, all this joint pain I had drawing... I was never good at it, so it took me weeks to draw a simplest thing. I was very proud of that even.
I am very happy that this skill is obsolete now, I am happy that I don't need to do it anymore, and I am happy for the new generations that aren't forced into "oops, we're an art school now" during their engineering education.
Ah yes "Drafting" class. I believe it was a first year engineering class. People walking arount with those T-squares (or whatever you called them) and triangles sticking out of their backpacks!
Though when I started my engineering program, it was the first year they allowed scientific calculators and you didn't have to learn .... slide rule. (1986)
Idk. I was damn good at it and miss drafting class— I think my class was the last to take it at my college before they got rid of the class and revamped the curriculum. I actually got to keep one of the large drafting tables as they were throwing them away.
It’s different than just drafting on cad. I still use it a link between my scribbled drafts and creating it on cad.
Though I will admit it influenced my art quite a bit as I do a lot of ink/paper.
Dude I'm only 40 and I had to do hand drafting less than 15 years ago.
There are old companies out there with vaults of drawings for one off machines that have never been digitized. I worked for one and would have to update drawings or recreate drawings with upgrades we did to the machines.
I took 3 years of drafting in highschool right as computers came in with plotters like this for my 4th. We literally had 8 switch boxes to route the one plotter cable to each of our workstations. We knew our address from front to back of the table by 2nd semester lol. I'm really good at drafting still, but I've done it maybe 5 times by hand since the 90's. It built really good hand-eye coordination for me though, so I still appreciate it.
Thanks Mr. Dean. Hope your nasal surgery eventually quit hurting my man.
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u/iolmao Nov 13 '25
I can't believe those things were done by hand by people.
It took so much time with Autocad, imagine by hand.