• You remember how to control lineweights by rolling the pencil as you draw

John Cabrall

• You remember that a spline is something you rest weights (ducks) on, to draw a curve

Bob Doncom

• You are asked if a Leroy Lettering Set is a package of fonts for AutoCAD (and where they can be downloaded)

S. Yoder

• You remember coming home after a good hunt, having a well done mammoth steak for dinner, laying out a new design of dinosaur trap on the wall of your cave

Vladimir Makarkin

• You know how to dress a ruling pen

Dennis Shinn

• You are asked why there is sandpaper on a stick in your drawer

S.Yoder

• You think you should own stock in the plastic’s industry because of all the templates you own

S. Yoder

• You rue the day they quit making drafting linen

Dennis Shinn

• A compass was for drawing arcs and circles and not finding the North pole

Dennis Shinn

• You know that some pencil sharpeners only remove the wood and don’t sharpen the lead

  Carl Taylor

• You know that the little piece of thin metal with all of the holes is called an erasing shield

Carl Taylor

• Your drafting table still has drafting powder in the seams

Anon.

• You still have a drafting table!

Anon

• You keep your electric eraser out and visible just because it’s been such a good friend

Anon.

• You can start out with a completely blacked out sheet of negative paper and scratch out a drawing with a razor blade or scalpel

Anon.

• When you were lucky enough to get Ralph Smoley (remember Smoley’s) to be your teacher for a ICS course in engineering

Anon.

• You have a set of railroad curves and a beam compass

Michael Pekarik

• When someone says scale, you ask architectural or engineering?

Michael Pekarik

• You remember filling your inking pen with an eyedropper, after first adjusting the line width by turning a knurled wheel on the side of the pen and “measuring” the width of the pen points

Dennis Staley

• You look for the slide rule icon

Chris

• Your back has formed the perfect curve for the Leroy lettering position

Chris

• You remember when blueprints were blue and sepias were erased with a chemical

Janet Hould

• You consider the electric eraser to be a new-fangled gadget invented by the Devil himself

Nick Bogut

• When you remember that before the plastic foam, everyone had a dark, speckle topped, rubber-band wrapped, roll of frazzled toilet paper on the drafting table

Doug Rohn

• You went to happy hour on Friday nights with drafting tape stuck to the elbows of your sleeves!

Dale Brooks

• You remember that the best drawing boards were made with balsa wood, to “heal” after the thumb tacks.

William Bambeck

• When a “file” was something that predates the sandpaper on a stick. You find you have a fond collection of 8″ flat files in your drawer.

William Bambeck

• You still have a large box of single edged razor blades (from before Exacto). Scalpels were too expensive.

William Bambeck

• You find that the “new” erasing shields now had a row of holes. Erase in them over a line and you had a nice, evenly spaced, dashed line. Wow! Why hadn’t someone thought of that before?

William Bambeck

• You know what an Adjustable Triangle is.

K. G. Farral

• You find that your “new” erasing machine seems pretty ineffective on CAD. Plus, it gets erasings all through the keyboard. Now you use it only for cleaning electronic contacts. (Whiteout doesn’t seem to fare any better on the screen.)

William Bambeck

• You know what a Parallel Guide is and how to use it with a set of Triangles.

K. G. Farral

• Your son is going through some of your old drafting stuff and asks you what this plastic trapezoid shaped item, with a rotating circular piece with a bunch of small holes holes in it was used for, and you can just barely read the name ‘Ames’ on it.

  Ken Dellenbach

• When you remember how fast an 8MHZ PC/AT was after a PC/XT.

  Anon

• You remember AutoCAD’s message “You have only 1 Mbyte of hard disc space left”

  Anon

• You remember sending your PC back to the supplier to have the full 20Mb hard drive replaced with a 40Mb drive after only nine months use.

  Anon

• You remember wanting to do CAD on an Atari ST.

  Anon

• You remember telephoning Autodesk’s headquarters for technical advice – and getting an answer!

  Anon

• You remember the customization manual saying, in effect, that icons are not a good way to convey information “…ask any archeologist”.

  Anon

• When paper space makes perfect sense and you figured it was about time when it finally showed up.

Al Alam

• Your PC sits on top of the old drafting table you can never ever throw away!

Mark Frise

• You remember finishing a days work on the drawing board and look down to see your hands, wrists and cuffs are all blackened by the graphite.

Marcelo Maffessoni

• You kept a roll of toilet paper close to the drawing board as an absorbent for cleaning of the exceeding ink of your Leroy pens.

Marcelo Maffessoni

• The draftsman is on vacation and you can’t find the ammonia bottle on your new plotter.

Gary J. Blenkhorn

• When you need lead for your pencil you go to the drugstore for Viagra.

T.Morris

• When you know why someone would need a chisel point on their pencil.

T.Morris

• When you are still looking for that error in Smoley’s for which the publisher would award you a $1000.00 if you could find one.

T Morris

• When you remember taking vellum tracing fabric home and boiling it in water to make white handkerchiefs.

T. Morris

• When you remember having GUM BAG FIGHTS in the office.

T. Morris

• When you were first introduced to Rotring and wondered, “What will they think of next?”

Mike Davenport

• You can remember when you could tell whose work it was by the style of the lettering.

Dana Damren

• You know what blue pencils were used for. (making marks that wouldn’t reproduce on the dyelines. Ed)

Dana Damren

• You can remember the first time you heard the word “ergonomics” (but didn’t really understand what it was all about).

Dana Damren

• You know that vellum isn’t tracing paper and that Mylar wasn’t always used just for toy balloons.

Dana Damren

• The old roll of drafting tape in the back of your desk drawer doesn’t have any “stick” left on it.

Dana Damren

• You know what an eraser tastes like and why you’d want to lick it in the first place.

Dana Damren

• Inkwells holding a bottle of india ink had a “pedal” allowing you to fill your ruling pen using only one hand.

Paul Ottens

• How to rub down a scratched erasure on drafting linen with a piece of soapstone.

Paul Ottens

• Extracting square roots on a 100-key rotary calculator by the “ding method”.

Paul Ottens

• The decimal equivalents for fractions pasted to the outside of your slide rule case.

Paul Ottens

• How to use the “folded” scales on your slide rule.

Paul Ottens

• How to keep track of the decimal point on your slide rule.

Paul Ottens

• 10-place Trig and Log table books.

Paul Ottens

• Draughting was a design skill – Drafting was what law clerks did

Craig  Murray

• When you shaded areas of drawings by flipping them over and rubbing pencil shavings on them with a tissue.

Craig  Murray

• Your tongue is permanently tattooed with black dots from tapping the pen nibs against them

Craig  Murray

• You can still taste eraser and know that when you die there must be 5lbs of it hidden somewhere inside you

Craig  Murray

• You can write legibly and people comment on the cool writing style you have.

Craig  Murray

• The first mouse you had was a white cloth bag filled with powdered eraser.

Craig  Murray