Roughly 25 years ago, I saw my first CAD/CAM system outside of
Chicago at what was then the largest U.S. manufacturer of Web
offset printing presses for the country's biggest newspapers. It
was a relatively rudimentary system by today's standards, but
there were engineers designing on dedicated workstations, which
were linked to a mainframe computer, which was itself linked to
machines that made many of the millions of metal parts that went
into these behemoth presses.  Bill Gloede Back then, architects
were still sitting behind drafting tables with pencils, squares,
rulers, and, of course, erasers.  Between then and now, those
massive mainframes I saw outside Chicago have been reduced down
to the laptop on which I'm writing this column. Visit an
architect's studio today, and you'd be hard pressed to find a
drafting table–or an eraser. The systems now in use have made
designing homes a much more streamlined process, from the
drawings themselves down to the reproduction of blueprints.
Changes can be made relat