#im not sure if i mentioned grian and mumbo's ages in this story--they're both about 28

[quaranmine]

also about autoCAD! according this rant an older engineer gave me, architects didnt start using autoCAD/other autodesk products until the 90s, when autodesk realized that if they got architects to use their products, everyone else had to lol

YEAHHH!! i found that too, it's buried somewhere in my 1700 words of author notes on tumblr LOL. grian, in this au, is pretty much like most people of the time period in that he knows basically nothing about computers and has probably never used one since they weren't particularly common, but he will very soon or over the course of his career need to learn since architecture is 100% a profession that uses autoCAD. he's going to get dragged kicking and screaming into the computer world sdflsjfsk

I had a fun little dive down the rabbit hole into CAD technologies while writing this chapter. I think I went into the story under the main assumption of "ah, it's the 80s, they don't have any modern technology" but that's not quite true, is it? It's the late 80s, for one--we're one year from being in the 90s. They're very much on the cusp of all of that technological innovation. Also, computer technology has generally existed far longer than most of us think, it just wasn't necessarily accessible to most of the public.

So while I was looking into CAD, I realized it was entirely possible for Mumbo to be learning it for his job in engineering. AutoCAD was released in 1982, which was directly in the middle of when he probably went to college in this AU. However, I don't know if he would have been taught it in his degree at that time since it was so new. He could, however, learn it from his job. I know that at my job one of the reasons I do most of the InDesign and ArcGIS work for my team is "ah, she's young enough to figure all that computer stuff out." I would not be surprised if that happened to Mumbo too. His bosses are probably like "fantastic he's young AND he's interested in it let's train him to do it" sdfjslfskl

Someone else mentioned CAD in one of my comments on AO3 so I was looking it up too. Something I didn't even know: the first 3D CAD product was released in 1987. Additionally, Boeing announced in 1988 that they would use a CAD software to design their 777 aircraft, which was the first aircraft to be designed entirely digitally. I read a different article about that that stated Boeing had used CAD in their engineering process for a few years before deciding to do it fully digitally, so it was definitely part of many company's "process" already within the 80s.