"All battles are fought where four maps come together."

In the Navy, all paper nautical charts were stowed in big flat drawers, so they could be placed on big, flat tables for use. You tried to avoid folds and creases because this meant measurements would be changed at the creases, and straight lines and angles would have little jogs in them and drafting tools would not lay flat on them.

Transferring lines and bearings/courses with parallel rules or triangles precisely is difficult, and length measurements with dividers never quite work out. Arcs drawn with compasses do not make it past creases well, either. Of course, unlike a destroyer's chart house and bridge, a yacht has no place for map drawers or chart tables. You usually just fold them and hope for the best. Rolling takes up too much space, and there is no flat area big enough for them to unroll.

In aerial photo mapping, map manuscripts are drawn with pencil on mylar drafting film, so rolling them is the only option. You cut the stuff with a razor blade (do they even make them any more?) and the cut edges can give you WICKED paper cuts. Mylar does not crease well. Fortunately, they always lay flat, except for maybe a little curl on the edges. You can't do Leroy lettering over a wrinkle, and ink will smear when it hits a crease.

Plotter-drawn computer maps are the easiest to manage. When the paper gets a little beat up, you just throw it away and run off another one.

I had an old textbook in one of my cartography courses, it was way out of date but it gave you an insight into how the old timers used to do it, there was even a few pages on how to properly sharpen a goose quill pen. I mastered Leroy lettering, Zip-a-tone tape and Pelikan pens and inks, which are probably a complete mystery to you youngsters.

And I still know how to calculate stockpile and crater volumes using a planimeter, a hand-drawn contour map, and a ten-key adding machine. I even know how to use a drop-bow compass!

Just think, all that knowledge and all those old skills, not just lost, but useless now. Remember, I used to be a computer weenie myself, a genuine Silicon Valley scientific/engineering programmer; today I can't program my TV. And believe it or not, some day it will happen to all of you, too.