Rotring ( & Staedler) is a company that made drawing office supplies - ink pens, proper set squares etc, etc. In the early eighies they developed a gizmo that attached to the draughting head on a drawing board and as you typed it wrote in stencil type script, they were all the rage until CAD made them redundant overnight.
A parallel motion - it's one type of draughting system - basically a Tee square on wires attached to pulleys on your drawing board - so it moves up and down and you can draw parallel horizontal lines - use a set square for the vertical an angles, and try not to smudge every thing. As an apprentice we used to either stick a bit of pencil lead under the ruler of the lad next to us so it drew thick lines up and down his work, or loosen the wires so it wasn't straight or just plain collapsed. Not quite on par with having your balls painted with mould oil on site, but it kept us amused.
As for slide rules you cheeky monkey - I am not that old I had a calculator at school!
Funny thing, I used to have a boat called Shy Talk, it was an Osprey - a Sparrowhawk, we used to think it was really cool, but the coastguard weren't that keen.
It's funny - I used to train up graduates on CAD systems at the last place ( I work from home now) and I really would have liked to get them to use a drawing board for a week or so and learn the basics properly.......
Aaah those were T'days tha knows.