A talk with my uncle about old wiring diagrams

I was helping my uncle clean out his garage last weekend, and he pulled out this big binder of wiring diagrams from the 70s. He pointed at one for a simple three-way switch setup and said, 'Back then, you had to really see the whole path in your head. Now you just look it up on your phone in two seconds.' It hit me because I realized I barely ever draw things out by hand anymore. I rely on my tablet app for everything, even quick sketches. His diagrams were all pencil on graph paper, with little notes in the margins about wire colors they used on a specific job in '78. It made me wonder if I'm losing something by not doing that physical layout step, even for small jobs. Do you guys still draw things out on paper first, or is that skill pretty much gone?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancy2753mo ago

That old way just wastes time and paper. Digital tools are faster and way more accurate. Your uncle probably forgot how many mistakes got erased on those graph paper margins.

james_clark3mo ago

Yeah, I was the same until a project went sideways.

olivere3021d ago

Used to be all about the physical notebooks myself. Then my quarterly forecast got completely thrown off because I couldn't track a single revision chain between three different paper sketches. Lost an entire afternoon trying to figure out which margin note was the final one. Now I get why people switch. One good version history saves more time than any graph paper ever could.