Splendour Under Sail - PAGE 42 
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The traditional tools of the yacht designer are a far cry from the Intergraph Computer Aided Design system we now use. Historically, paper, pencils and a good set of drawing splines were all that was needed to allow the designer to commit to paper drawings from which the builder produced the finished yacht. This process relied on the designer being in close proximity to the building facility. Designing for builders on another continent was rare and fraught with difficulties. Some of the best designers, like Herreshoff in the USA and Nicholson in England, were not only in control of the design process but their own companies actually built most of their designs.
Traditional design methods still persist, but they necessarily require the builders to take on much of the responsibility for ad-hoc decision making "on the job”.
I needed to find a new approach so that my designs could be more accurately presented and my clients were better able to visualise the end product. This meant giving the builder sufficient detail to anticipate many design decisions he would otherwise have to make himself. As the market for larger yachts expanded I could see myself forced to take on more people than I could personally control to bring my design ideas to life with accuracy. In 1983 I decided to invest in a Computer Aided Design system (CAD)—a serious investment for the future.
The following extracts from a paper my partner Butch Dalrymple-Smith presented to the 1988 HISWA Symposium in Holland describes the effect. This is an annual conference coincident with the Amsterdam boat show, which enables professionals in the yachting industry to keep up to date with new trends in technology.
Our decision to go for the Intergraph system was based on its greater capability than other systems on the market, some much cheaper, and many even available for home computers. The more expensive systems offer speed of operation and additional features which more than compensate for their extra cost. Much of the criticism of computer aided design comes from those who have been exposed to the frustration of trying to work a system which is too slow or lacking in the very features which make CAD worthwhile.
After four years of use we are still happy with our choice. The VAX 750 computer at its heart also handles all our word and data processing requirements except for Apple IIE for weight studies and an IBM for accounting, both of which we have never quite been able to dispense with.
With the Intergraph system, in common with most large computers, it is possible to start off comparatively small, and invest in more processing power as the workload increases. We currently have eight disc drives totalling 748 megabytes of memory and an eight megabyte central processor driving six double screen workstations
The traditional tools of the yacht designer are a far cry from the Intergraph Computer Aided Design system we now use. Historically, paper, pencils and a good set of drawing splines were all that was needed to allow the designer to commit to paper drawings from which the builder produced the finished yacht. This process relied on the designer being in close proximity to the building facility. Designing for builders on another continent was rare and fraught with difficulties. Some of the best designers, like Herreshoff in the USA and Nicholson in England, were not only in control of the design process but their own companies actually built most of their designs.
Traditional design methods still persist, but they necessarily require the builders to take on much of the responsibility for ad-hoc decision making "on the job”.
I needed to find a new approach so that my designs could be more accurately presented and my clients were better able to visualise the end product. This meant giving the builder sufficient detail to anticipate many design decisions he would otherwise have to make himself. As the market for larger yachts expanded I could see myself forced to take on more people than I could personally control to bring my design ideas to life with accuracy. In 1983 I decided to invest in a Computer Aided Design system (CAD)—a serious investment for the future.
The following extracts from a paper my partner Butch Dalrymple-Smith presented to the 1988 HISWA Symposium in Holland describes the effect. This is an annual conference coincident with the Amsterdam boat show, which enables professionals in the yachting industry to keep up to date with new trends in technology.
Our decision to go for the Intergraph system was based on its greater capability than other systems on the market, some much cheaper, and many even available for home computers. The more expensive systems offer speed of operation and additional features which more than compensate for their extra cost. Much of the criticism of computer aided design comes from those who have been exposed to the frustration of trying to work a system which is too slow or lacking in the very features which make CAD worthwhile.
After four years of use we are still happy with our choice. The VAX 750 computer at its heart also handles all our word and data processing requirements except for Apple IIE for weight studies and an IBM for accounting, both of which we have never quite been able to dispense with.
With the Intergraph system, in common with most large computers, it is possible to start off comparatively small, and invest in more processing power as the workload increases. We currently have eight disc drives totalling 748 megabytes of memory and an eight megabyte central processor driving six double screen workstations
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