the declining standards / quality of modern day designers.

[bernardgreen]

Indeed... CAD systems and other software and means of communication during projects have played a big part in alienating designers from reality.
I was a graphic designer before and after the Mac seized the industry and came to detest the way in which it changed things... I am a hands-on type and missed that immensely - so I went from one "hot metal" to anothe

I went to Germany in1971 to work for T&N designing digital systems using mainly TTL and discrete components in electronic telephone exchanges. It annoyed me when I was told I had to do two weeks in the drawing office laying out PCBs. In those days before CAD it was red and green pencils to work out the lay out on paper with the finalised design being copied using red and green tapes on transparent film for the photographic process.

Those two weeks were an eye opener for me as to the problems facing the draughtsmen and women when developing a circuit design into a PCB layout. Made me think about the layout during the circuit design and how to make the draught person task easier.

Today I use Cadstar for both circuit design and PCB layout but still work at circuit design stage to minimise the track layout conflicts in the PCB

The other art that has long gone is the ability to design for minimum component count.

One of 12 boards from the Soemtron Desk calculator 1967

Designers had to minimise the number ofcomponents used without compromising the functionality of the machine. Today adding a few hundred components to the silicon of a integrated circuit is not difficult task.

 

[mattylad]

Yay another CADSTAR user...
I have used it for 20 years, helped and trained many others to use it.

Yes many designers these days expect everything to be done for you and often want to find the magic button that just does the entire design for you.
They don't actually go and see how a board is produced, assembled and fitted to see how best to design it.

 

[bernardgreen]

Yes many designers these days expect everything to be done for you

So much today is designed not by the named designer but by the anonymous programming team who wrote the tools the designer uses.

Cadstar Version 7.5 running on DOS. Almost bullet proof. My only comment is that the AutoRouter lacks imagination.

 

[mattylad]

Oh the autorouter improved over time, but still never as good as the human brain could do it - just faster.

I still use the hotkey shortcuts I used in the dos version though.
I have not run 7.5 for many many years, still have the manual in the cellar though lol
Now I'm on the current one with all its windows bells & whistles.

 

[gasbanni]

My design days twere pencils ! and brains ...........some of my designs were produced in millions !

The engineering designs were not massed produced. One brief was to produce drawn gearing profiles for vw car jacks ....that was a stupid brief !

I did use cad latterly. But drawing on 8' long drawing boards was more fun.