The Boeing Company

At the Boeing Space Center in WA, I was recruited to help migrate the vast library of technical drawing of various domestic and military aircraft (and aircraft parts) onto a searchable digital platform. The Boeing Company is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems.

The current technology was to use punch cards and then scan them.

First a photograph of the schematic was taken with a specialized camera that use punch cards to record. The negative was processed in the camera and the blank punch card was produced.

 

 

 

 

Once the document had been completely captured it was sent to a punching process. One machine punched the card and the next sorted them by batch. Once the document was verified it was sent back to the vault.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then the punch cards were scanned and loaded to an image database. My role specifically was to develop the imaging interface that the engineers could use to search the database for blueprints.