I was in this business before personal computers, and well remember pencil and paper drafting. Until a year ago, I STILL had a big table in this garage, with one of those ruler-holding things that slide up and down on a track.

One of my first jobs out of college was at Control Data, and I was hired to take hundreds of E-sized Lockheed drawings done in pencil and darken the lines carefully to make them printable. That was it, eight hours a day, five days a week. But when they laid everyone off at the end, they kept me. You can take ANY job and do it better than the next guy.

When my first rocket company went under, I turned to patent drafting to make ends meet. At the time, it was an exotic field, with a specific 19th-century style, done in black ink on a special board that had to be bought at an art supply store. Around here, a lot of the jobs involved circuit diagrams. I would have gone nuts.

This is when I bought my first PC-AT, financed it instead of a car, and got an AutoCAD setup. I figured out how to duplicate the drafting style, and got a flat-bed ink pen plotter that turned out the right stuff. A circuit diagram goes a lot easier when you can shove everything over half an inch when you run out of room.

I'm back in the rocket business again (for about the fourth time). It used to take a room full of people and several vendors to do what I do alone, now.

Drafting, engineering, calculations, realistic illustrations, typesetting, formatting, paste-up, presentation slides, you name it. All on this box in front of me. And I don't use a third of its potential. Anybody remember ordering type from a typesetter and gluing it down?

Multiply this by every industry in America, and frankly, it's a frigging miracle the unemployment rate is as low as it is.