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Crafton Tull recently acquired a drone for topographic surveys.
Do you have a new tech culture? You should if you want more business and enhanced services for your clients, and besides, the new generation of engineers has to have it.
I n 1971 the founders of our firm went to their local banker and asked to borrow $130,000 to invest in a new technology for their business. They told the banker how it would set their company apart and give them a competitive advantage over other firms due to the time savings it would provide. The banker skeptically agreed and loaned the money.
Matt Crafton ENGINEERING INSIGHTS
With that loan they bought an IBM 1130 mainframe computer – it filled an entire room, required a paid staff of people to run it, and was the first of its kind in the state. But, it did what the founders hoped it would do and gave the firm a significant advantage at the time. They were able to run calculations many times faster than the average firm, and if a project needed to change midstream, they didn’t have to start over from scratch. It was such an innovation at the time that civil engineering students from our local university would take field trips to go see “the Crafton Tull computer.” It’s amazing how far and how fast technology has leapt ahead over the past few decades. For those of us who’ve been around a while, we remember when CAD was first introduced to the industry and how some people scoffed at it being a passing fad. We remember when we could first send electronic mail messages to other people, the rise
(and passing) of the fax machine, and the move from hand drafting to plotters. “We’ve leaned out pretty far on some new technologies over the past couple of decades, and more often than not it has worked out well for us.” Why were all of these technologies created? For the same reason our founders went begging for a loan in 1971 – to allow companies to produce work faster and more accurately, thereby giving a competitive advantage.
We’ve tried to keep the same culture of being
See MATT CRAFTON, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 22, 2016, ISSUE 1165
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