The vignette picture
In 1984 the Macintosh arrived and the great moment when you, for the first time in the PC world, fairly easy could combine text and pictures without using a copying machine reducing, enlarging, cutting and pasting to place a picture in text. With my background in aeronautics at the Aeronautical Research Institute of Sweden the first thing I tried to draw was of course an airplane. I used MacPaint to sketch it and it has followed me ever since so I thought that it would be a nice vignette picture for this site that is mostly about CAD (Computer Aided Design).

The sketch of the airplane was inspired by WW2 fighters and some other designs of that era. Whether it would have been a good airplane we will never know and the final version would probably have come out differently if it had been built. A good design usually requires many changes before you arrive at the final version. And Macpaint wasn' t real CAD either.

At work I had to design wind tunnel models among other things, and in my spare time I de-signed and competed with quite a few model airplanes for control line flying, radio control-led aerobatics flying and gliding. But that was long before the introduction of personal com-puters. So i spent many hours sweating in front of a drawing board, sharpening pencils, drawing with ink, and performing many other time consuming tasks. Only fancy if I had had PowerCADD by then, that would have been marvelous. I would have been able to draw without bothering about changing or erasing. Today you can undo, or you can copy a detail from one place to another instead of drawing the same thing once again. Or you can just grab a detail and drag it to make it longer....or......or.........

Jesper von Segebaden

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