Talking about your company putting in their first CAD machine.... I was "honored" when my firm sent my office in Chicago the first Punch Tape computer/communicator outside of NYC. Probably was circa 1970's or so????
The idea was that we would punch tape showing receipts and delivery of securities every day.
We would send that data over the sloooow modem line, and the NYC office could book the entries as if they had the securities in hand. That allowed NY to borrow against the securities without actually having them there. That was worth a lot of money to the firm.
Only.....no one had ever used that machine in a branch office before. Neither our "brains" in NY nor the company's tech guys could figure out how to get the machine going. It would click on; read about an inch of the punch tape...and STOP.
Weeks of trying didn't help.
Then, I took the manual home one night. Reading it in great detail, I read the part that said that "the initial entry had to be five digits" or more.
Duhhhhhh.... We had these sheets of paper where everything was entered. The first entry was the line number ----1-----. Whoops....that was ONE digit.
I changed the first line to 00001......and everything worked from that time on.
We got modern with punch cards a few years later. Ha Ha...
rich