Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1532278
26 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2025 Let's just admit it. e baby boomer PCB designers are looking at retirement, but it's been a good run. In the 1980s, many of us still "taped out" our PCB artwork layers and then drove them over to the graphic art service to be photo- reduced onto film positives and negatives. en, almost overnight, the PCB design industry changed. Computer-aided design soware tools made our old light tables, Mylar sheets, and rubylith tape obsolete. ere was no Internet. Once our CAD layout design was finished, we exported the data onto large "mag" tape reels, which—like our hand-taped designs—had to be delivered to that same pho- toplotting service. What an important job we had when we were selected to take the com- pany fleet car and deliver the design data to a service like Advanced Circuit Graphics. CAM data was a lot different 45 years ago. e data had one purpose: to drive a mechani- cal laser to expose film depicting a PCB circuit layer. We had to provide an aperture table with Target Condition Feature Column by Kelly Dack, CIT, CID+ 'Boomer to Zoomer: Do You Copy?'