CADD drawings show their age.
The year 1947. The task: an architect drew by hand with artistic stroke and tedious detail the plans - multiple pages 36" x 48" for the dam and associated buildings, occupied and controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Place: Buggs Island Lake - the huge reservoir on the N.C. - VA border that flooded untold acres and provided water for the region with watersports and vacation property a byproduct.
The year 1995: I was involved in training the army personnel to scan and convert those plans and others to images to be stored for archive on computer media. It sounds simple, but making the whole system work, from the hardware interface, with wide scanners, plotters, and PCs, plus the the software control and image format options made it quite a complicated process.
I squirreled away and somehow still have a couple of the images of a cross section of the main dam, with the power turbines, dam construction, and main headquarters building. There is much more to see on the complete drawings, with the great handwork, but here are a couple of clips that are interesting. They show some of the engineering but also a bit of social history common in 1947 Virginia. Check out the separate facilities on the third clip.
I was in this building in 1995, and I don't remember the rooms being marked this way.
