I just viewed Dave Jone’s latest video blog about the Sony Walkman. For some reason, I decided to download the service manual and have a look. One thing that I immediately noticed, was the lettering on the schematic appears to be another example of Leroy Lettering.

This caused me to reflect a little bit about my first year or two of college and my first job in industry. Before discovering computer science, I started out in a mechanical engineering program. The first engineering oriented courses you took, were drafting courses. I had no trouble with perspective and different technical aspects of drawing. However, I really had trouble creating drawings that looked nice, clean and sharp. There was no mention of Leroy or any other mechanical lettering system, so we had to hand letter our work. To this day, I don’t have the hand of an artist, and I think that lack of natural artistic ability held me back in that program. The skill of an artist, developed or natural is something that is apparent in a well done engineering drawing or schematic.

In years gone by, many engineers would spend their workday at a drafting board. I started my first co-op engineering job, in the late 70’s. That first company that I worked for, still had a drafting department for creating PCB layouts, as well as an art department that did the artwork for manuals as well as marketing material. The “uniform” of many of the experienced engineers was a white shirt, dark pants, a dark tie and a pocket protector. Second level managers omitted the pocket protector and added a sport coat. It’s basically the look of the NASA mission control team for the Apollo program.

A few years later, in the early 80s, I remember going for a job interview at IBM’s small system division. That was the first home of the IBM PC which was located in Boca Raton, Florida. Almost all the engineers there still wore that “uniform”. I did see one guy wearing a colorful shirt and jeans. He stuck out like a sore thumb. The IBM employee that was with me at that moment, pointed him out, and said he didn’t really fit in to the culture.

How times have changed.