And even now the industry is still changing. The old (for me) standard was obtaining reprographics from a full service supplier, signing a contract, leasing large format plotters, monthly delivery of toner, on-call maintenance.

My favorite plotter was an Océ and I think that company died? My last office was reliant on an Océ plotter which had a Windows Forms GUI app running on a never-updated embedded Windows XP. A perfect use case for embedded Linux but I guess it either predates embedded Linux or corporate offices at the time preferred embedded Windows.

Now we don't even print drawings.

I enjoyed the article because it is written by a stereotypical draftsman. While we all write in paragraphs, draftsman have some self-taught logic which results in this confusing blog format with random quotations, italicized sentences, arbitrary mix of heading styles, self-invented acronyms. Every draftsman I ever met 1. knew better than everyone 2. Knew you were always wrong 3. eternally pissed off.