Originally posted by THoog I got to visit the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville this past spring, and standing under their Saturn V, I was struck how such a huge machine, with millions of parts in thousands of subsystems (built by different contractors) could be planned and built with everything done on PAPER.
When I worked in civil engineering way back in the Dark Ages we did everything on paper. And I used an HP33C scientific notation calculator rather than a slide rule to make complex calculations.
Sometimes I reflect on those days, and miss them.
Even though the work seemed daunting, looking back it is easy to see that they were much simpler times. No cell phones. No computers. No internet. None of the distractions of today's 'Space Age' life.