I just looked in the phone book, and called up the Executive Officer of the Servomechanisms Laboratory (Al Sise) and said, "I'm a math graduate stude… - Douglas T. Ross

Mechanical drawings and blueprints are not mere pictures, but a complete and rich language. In blueprint language, scientific, mathematical, and geometric formulations, notations, mensurations, and naming do not merely describe an object or process, they actually model it. Because of broad differences in subject, purpose, roles, and the needs of the people who use them, many forms of blueprint have evolved, but all rigorously present well structured information in understandable form.

There are certain basic, known principles about how people's minds go about the business of understanding, and communicating understanding by means of language, which have been known and used for many centuries. No matter how these principles are addressed, they always end up with hierarchic decomposition as being the heart of good storytelling. Perhaps the most relevant formulation is the familiar: "Tell 'em whatcha gonna tell'em. Tell 'em. Tell 'em whatcha told 'em." This is a pattern of communication almost as universal and well-entrenched as Newton's laws of motion.

Automatic design has the computer do too much and the human do too little, whereas automatic programming has the human do too much and the computer do too little. Both techniques are important, but are not representative for what we wish to mean by computer-aided design.