It’s long ago now—more than four decades back, during a time when I would fly to Mojave every week in Melmoth to have lunch with Burt Rutan and his then tiny group of employees. From a dilapidated barracks there, RAF, the Rutan Aircraft Factory, sold plans of the novel canard VariEze to amateur builders.
RAF started in the pre-digital age, when the tools of the aeronautical engineer were still slide rule and drafting paper. Around 1980, however, Rutan bought an Apple 2 computer. When the salesman asked him whether he would like a second 160 kilobyte floppy disk in addition to the one supplied with the computer, he declined it, saying that he would certainly never fill even the first disk. Some time later he proudly showed me a Corvus hard drive for which he had paid thousands of dollars. It had the unimaginably vast capacity of 10 megabytes.
