I wasn’t with LaMarr Bunn & Assoc. when it happened. He made his decision following a convention show, determined that beyond just “keeping up”, he could use computers specifically for what he does. LaMarr prepares subdivision and commercial development plans for particular clients who know of his ability to take projects through whatever zoning and approval may be necessary.

“1 was tired of developing both a better design and a better utilization for a property,” La Marr says’ “only to have an engineer say ?EUR??,,????'??No, this won’t work. You can’t fit that on there.?EUR??,,????'??? So I went out and bought the best equipment that seemed to suit our needs.” With some good advice from Survey Assoc., who were trying to stay well ahead in their field, LaMarrr decided on AutoCAD.

“We weren’t afraid of learning. We were concerned more with starting in a strong position and being able to stay with it as everything progressed, as everything does. For range of utilization and compatibility, there was no other choice. Everybody uses AutoCAD. Whatever we might want to do, we could.”

With previous experience in Landscape and Planning and a recent formal course in AutoCAD, I was hired to make it all work. LaMarr chose the Hewlett Packard 80286-287 AT-compatible, with a DraftPro plotter and EGA monitor. Although you get a Summasketch, LaMarr also got a Hitachi 24×36 digitizer for surveys, maps, and his sketches, and that is what I use from one corner with a four-button puck. There was a printer, and a drafting table just in case.

There was also a project waiting, with more road engineering required than I’d ever wanted to know. I was able to produce real work with AutoCAD in a few days. Our survey package cost me inexcusable difficulty for months, but that remains the basis of our reliance on the computer.

Our base maps are so coherently accurate that a few of my problems turned out to be errors that had to be corrected on the engineer’s hand drawings.

So far, in fact, only Survey Assoc. has the means?EUR??,,????'??+and willingness?EUR??,,????'??+to hand me a disk so I can get busy. AutoCad supposedly accepts its own file type plus DXF, DXB, and IGES in all formats. Yet not even the large variety store or grocery chains will send me something to “plug in”. It isn’t computers that exchange information.

What we do is collect plan dimensions and characteristics from anywhere we can. We have a directory of about forty “footprints”, ranging from banks to a toy store, that can be manipulated as “blocks” on a plan during any stage of design and redevelopment. Because AutoCAD is based on the math of geometry, each item of data exists as a chosen definition that can be almost limitlessly redefined, always and effortlessly to the unlimited precision of double-floating-point calculation.

Having established our property with N.C. grid coordinates, and using those same lines to position buildings and produce paving lines, staking plans or questions about easements or areas are automatically resolved to absolute references for the field. Any line or point we choose can be produced and reported or transferred by bearing and distance and grid position to any decimals.

We were to take this plan from sketch to permits. Starting from metes-and-bounds, which produced excellent closure in this case, I first had to rotate the file parallel to a page border and then copy a corner to another place on the sheet to satisfy Town of Cary’s submittal requirements. Working by automatic parallel offsets from the outside in, I could meet all buffer and drive requirements and position the buildings exactly.

By placing LaMarr’s design sketch on the big digitizer, I could match constructions on the screen with cursor movement over the sketch. CAD generally is incapable of the spiral curves that people tend to draw, but road engineers don’t like them either. I found a set of arcs that fit very well and that could be easily restored as buildings and entrance turn-outs might be changed.

Each submittal for Plan Review had to look finished, so the files grew quite large. Like expressways, whatever capacity your computer has is soon filled to jamming and you want something faster. We neglected to put contours in the file for that reason, and the unlucky engineer, Bill Piver Assoc., was stuck with the same old sepias through some changes in the site plan, erasing and patching to the last. At least I could take Kent Yelverton an exact plot of some portion to be traced onto their masters.

AutoCAD is a poor video game, and we do not ?EUR??,,????'??fool around?EUR??,,????'?? on the computer.

Mr. Piver got us to do some area takeoffs (automatic from any Polyline), but “we don’t do cut-and-fill”. One of the particular accomplishments of AutoCAD for this project was providing nearly perfect angled parking around the circular drive. Parking for this job was not just a ratio: cars are the business. Each Plan Review cost us about a hundred places, with some massive revisions. Buildings changed, dimensions changed, entrances moved, and erasing sepias would not have sufficed. With CAD, what you get is a new mylar, in some fraction of an hour.

Cary Auto Park went through five versions before Plan Approval, and the final set of drawings presented five versions of the main file at three scales. The Landscape Plan, for instance, had a bolder line for curbs: changed in that file with three key strokes. We had a sheet of just the buffer areas, with portions enlarged from 50 to 20-scale: by two commands. Trees, which we made as Blocks, were counted on the drawing itself by a program I wrote in AutoLISP, the language that allows direct access to file codes and functions as part of AutoCAD’s “open architecture” principle.

AutoCAD’s major operational weakness for many users is screen regeneration time as you move around a complex drawing, and a fix for that is tops on our upgrade budget. I can tell you, having done both for the same task, that replacing one line on a sepia is about equal to changing that line in a file: which isn’t a tracing yet. Although my Polyline areas are unimpeachable, John’s planimeter holds up very well. John Blackley, Mr. Bunn’s associate for three years, is often faster than “Hubey”, our Hewlett Packard, and always faster than me. His drawings have been selling and building jobs for some years, and still are.

AutoCAD is a poor video game, and we do not “fool around” on the computer. We do not sketch, or use 3-D or make slide shows or fancy color plots with it. We do not use many things over and over and have no automated drawings. Clients do not come here for drawings: they come here for design. People still do that, in our office; and one of our tools is a computer.