My college had architectural drawings for some of its oldest buildings - drawn in ink with a ruling pen on linen. When I started in architecture, construction drawings were hand drafted using lead on a 100% rag paper called vellum. Shortly after - briefly - it was ink on Mylar, a frosted clear plastic. Now computer drafting is back to ink, but on bond paper.
Reproducing drawings was, in olden days, a matter of tracing by hand onto translucent paper. (In the late 1960s a school kid had to trace illustrations for a report - no copiers yet.) Blueprints came, then blue-lines, then sepias and black-line prints... all Diazo prints made with chemically treated papers rolled through a printer that fumigated them with ammonia. (Boy! did it smell and did a papercut ever sting!) In the Mylar days, some drawings were made on multiple layers and assembled with pin-bars (to hold them registered with each other), then printed on a flat-bed printer. The intern who printed these got to throw their body on the flat-bed to try to keep it flat and keep air bubbles out. Now the computer's ink-jet plotter makes as many copies as you like.
What comes next?
public domain image of an architect at his drafting board
