Originally Posted by
john_tullamarine
With the advent of electonic computers which are great at doing LOTS of sums very quickly, the stressman can drill down a lot further into smaller and smaller parts of the structure. At the end of the process you can realise some weight savings.
I remember the stress office at Hatfield found that when you got the computer to calculate LOTS of sums you still needed LOTS of staff to plough through the bales of paper output to approve (or otherwise) the MANY results.
When CAD started to appear in drawing offices some of our older friends caused a drawing sticker to be produced with a DBH logo - "Drawn By Hand".
If we Future Projects numbers men defined an aeroplane, one of those DBH drawings of a three-view GA could be ready by lunchtime, whereas coding it for CAD could take a week. The latter was better if you were going to try a multitude of small variations, but as we rarely did that DBH won.