I was first hired as a technical illustrator by the Electro-Optical division of the Perkin Elmer Corporation in 1981.
At this time, computers had not yet arrived and the illustrations were all generated by hand using ellipse guides and technical pens. Then in the late 80s, we bought Interleaf, a UNIX based publications system, which provided software to compose documents and to create illustrations. The drawing package was excellent, and I still believe it is the best tool for creating technical line art illustrations that I have used. We continued to use this tool until the late 90s when it was finally abandoned and Microsoft took over. At this point the artwork was generated using Corel Draw, PowerPoint, or 3D CAD.
In June 2002 Goodrich disbanded the art department and I was laid off. I was then hired in August 2002 by Lorad, a company which makes mammography devices. The pubs group here uses Framemaker to compose the documents, and I primarily use Adobe Illustrator to generate the graphics
