Cut and Paste

I was impressed with how organized the structures department at McDonnell Douglas was back in 1985, in fact they had their own, formal, structural manual that was not just an instruction manual of how to run the computer programs, it also presented theory behind the methods.

As the stress office at APPH had to produce formal reports using those methods, we were tasked in reproducing both the logic and the output format for our programs (written in BASIC) and went through a benchmark process to ensure that our programs results and output format matched theirs. The resulting output from our computer programs would then be "cut and pasted" onto our headed paper.

Literally.

When I arrived off the boat to work at Dowty in Ajax, Canada in 1988. The methods were about the same, computer programs (written in FORTRAN) were run on the mainframe via dumb terminals, printed on the big rattling Decwriter dot matrix printer (picture to follow) and then scissors and paste sticks used to add the output to headed paper for our formal reports.

The logic behind a lot of those programs had also been acquired in a similar way, theory from textbooks like Bruhn, Roark, Timoshenko or Maddux. or over time, theory filched from aeronautical trade publications quoting the likes of Melcon and Hoblit or Cozzone.

The bulk of accepted theory would be from more formal sources such as the Military handbook, DeHavilland, Boeing or McDonnell Douglas structures manuals and as I would eventually find out, from their competitors.

It seemed like an industrial standard that we had a sort of industrial standard.