Ahh.. yes... Buzz...
Doug's comment concerning Buzz and his architectural scale in reply to my last post begs for me to expand upon...
FYI - Doug is my current boss and was also my boss at the architectural firm where I was working at the time that I first started using AutoCAD back in 1986. Buzz was the other partner in that firm (his real name was "Gus", but everybody called him "Buzz"). He was an old school guy, and is now retired, I'm sure. Doug was the technology evangelist in the firm.
One day Buzz got a call from a client asking for the square footage of his office in the plans we were working on - he needed to get a price on some carpet. There apparently weren't any scale-able prints laying around when Buzz came back to the drafting room. I had been working on that particular client's plans at the time, and happened to have his office up on the screen, but had stepped away from my computer for a bit. Probably to go run some bluelines or something - anybody remember bluelines?
Ah... the ammonia buzz...
But I digress...
So, anyway, I came back from wherever I was only to find Buzz sitting in front of my computer with an architect's scale up against the screen!
"This room seems awful large." He said.
I reached over and ZOOMed out a significant amount, and asked "Is that better?"
"Yes, but it still looks out of scale somehow. Be sure and fix that, OK?"
Fortunately, we were able to get the client the ACTUAL area of his office despite the obvious limitations and shortcomings of our AutoCAD technology...
FYI - Doug is my current boss and was also my boss at the architectural firm where I was working at the time that I first started using AutoCAD back in 1986. Buzz was the other partner in that firm (his real name was "Gus", but everybody called him "Buzz"). He was an old school guy, and is now retired, I'm sure. Doug was the technology evangelist in the firm.
One day Buzz got a call from a client asking for the square footage of his office in the plans we were working on - he needed to get a price on some carpet. There apparently weren't any scale-able prints laying around when Buzz came back to the drafting room. I had been working on that particular client's plans at the time, and happened to have his office up on the screen, but had stepped away from my computer for a bit. Probably to go run some bluelines or something - anybody remember bluelines?
Ah... the ammonia buzz...
But I digress...
So, anyway, I came back from wherever I was only to find Buzz sitting in front of my computer with an architect's scale up against the screen!
"This room seems awful large." He said.
I reached over and ZOOMed out a significant amount, and asked "Is that better?"
"Yes, but it still looks out of scale somehow. Be sure and fix that, OK?"
Fortunately, we were able to get the client the ACTUAL area of his office despite the obvious limitations and shortcomings of our AutoCAD technology...
posted by Matt Dillon at 5:18 PM
2 Comments:
Way back in the day, my firm actually had a LISP routine that supposedly would set the zoom so that the display would be "to scale". I never had much luck with it myself (flat, rigid scale - curved screen), but apparently there were enough people here like Buzz that someone felt it would be useful.
And I do miss the smell of amonia off-gassing from a roll of fresh prints; that brings back fond memories of developing prints in my high school drafting class. The newfangled print machine we had only did the light exposure part; developing the print required rolling it up, lifting a plastic tube off of the base that contained a open dish of the developing solution, shoving the print in the tube and replacing it before inflicting permanent lung damage. Making the first print of the day and getting to take the lid off of the dish was a special treat. Our teach told us we were lucky - back in the day for him meant placing the drawing over the print paper in a glass frame and using sunlight to expose the paper.
Ah... lung damage. Almost as fun as brain damage. And frequently accomplished at the same time.
But you didn't hear that from me...
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