alt Hacker NewsIn hindsight, folding paper airplanes as a kid was the first testbench in rapid prototyping, and a forerunner to the fail fast philosophy.
In hindsight, folding paper airplanes as a kid was the first testbench in rapid prototyping, and a forerunner to the fail fast philosophy.
Yes. Personal anecdote. I won the 1978 UCLA paper airplane contest by exactly this method.
There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.
(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)
[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.