> Since [Tracy Newby] first learned drafting on "the board" in Junior High
> School (in
> 1979) and I grew up with my father bringing home drawings from work to
> show me, I KNOW I can do my job with out a computer. In fact I own a very
> nice drafting table and I kept all my drafting equipment from my first
> drafting job, which went from manual drafting to CAD system use....
Tracy, when I first started my engineering career in 1983, I was the last in the company to be trained in ink on vellum drafting and the first to be trained in CAD. My notion is that even if we *can* still do ink on vellum drafting, the final product is practically useless because it cannot be transmitted via phone line (unless it is scanned, of course, in which case, we still rely on computers). Even if we can still find typewriters, the documents they produce are practically useless until they are scanned and converted into ASCII softcopy. spike