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My father worked for Boeing during (or shortly after) the time the 747 was designed. It was all done with pencil and paper. Thousands of draftsmen drawing every

My father worked for Boeing during (or shortly after) the time the 747 was designed. It was all done with pencil and paper. Thousands of draftsmen drawing every little component. I can't imagine the scale of such a process. My favorite bit about that. If you were take all the drawings produced during the design phase, and put them on a 747, it would't get off the ground. Not sure if apocryphal or not, but I buy it. EDIT: I see in another comment you worked there as well. Maybe you can verify the "heavy documents" anecdote :)

WalterBright 9y ago
There was a joke that the design was not done until the weight of the paperwork exceeded the weight of the airplane, but I doubt anyone added it all up. The 757 was the last Boeing airliner to be designed on paper. They were experimenting with CAD software at the time, but it was pretty primitive. Slide rules were long gone. Engineers used calculators, and I snuck into the computer room and used Fortran for my work that had traditionally been done graphically with drafting equipment (I had no idea how that worked).
- Gibbon1 9y ago
  My dad[1] worked on I think can't find the right term, but the fixtures that hold satellites while they're carried into space. Back in the late 60's they were using numerical analysis to design the things. But have a gut feeling before 1980-1985 likely wasn't anything that could hold, retrieve and display, edit all the cad drawings for something as complex as a 757. Bonus I remember retraining our draftsman to use CAD back in the late 80's, twuz painful. [1] Bonus my dad is as old as the DC3.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Computer numerical analysis was used in some areas. But not with anything I was involved in (other than the programs I wrote myself), and it was not connected with CAD software. Bonus: my dad flew DC-3's :-) He had nothing but good things to say about them.

WalterBright 9y ago

There was a joke that the design was not done until the weight of the paperwork exceeded the weight of the airplane, but I doubt anyone added it all up. The 757 was the last Boeing airliner to be designed on paper. They were experimenting with CAD software at the time, but it was pretty primitive. Slide rules were long gone. Engineers used calculators, and I snuck into the computer room and used Fortran for my work that had traditionally been done graphically with drafting equipment (I had no idea how that worked).

Gibbon1 9y ago
My dad[1] worked on I think can't find the right term, but the fixtures that hold satellites while they're carried into space. Back in the late 60's they were using numerical analysis to design the things. But have a gut feeling before 1980-1985 likely wasn't anything that could hold, retrieve and display, edit all the cad drawings for something as complex as a 757. Bonus I remember retraining our draftsman to use CAD back in the late 80's, twuz painful. [1] Bonus my dad is as old as the DC3.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Computer numerical analysis was used in some areas. But not with anything I was involved in (other than the programs I wrote myself), and it was not connected with CAD software. Bonus: my dad flew DC-3's :-) He had nothing but good things to say about them.