Thanks for some good info - I remember the drawing offices at my old work filled with lots of boards and hard working men and women. No computers ;-)
My impression is that the CAD tools sometimes separate us from the reality of design. The old designers may not have had the fancy software, but they had a lot of common sense behind them. I battle daily with young engineers who will blindly believe the numbers that the computer spits out.
A few recent gems:
"I don't care what the flight test results say, my prediction is correct. I looked up the formula in Roskam and I've double checked my maths!"
"OK, so we designed to the finite element predictions, and the finite element overpredicted the stresses by 50%. At least we know the structure is strong enough".
"Yes, but it's overweight"
"And the problem is??"
"But the diagonal tension field didn't show up on NASTRAN, how am I meant to know about it? "
Children of Magenta?