The technological progress which has taken place during the last decade introduced a totally new outlook regarding the professional computational environment in general, and regarding the engineering profession in particular. During many years engineering computing was performed based on large computer centers, getting bigger and bigger all the time, going from mainframes to super computers, essentially producing numerical results on paper media. Lately, however, it has been realized that a much more productive computational environment can be implemented using an open architecture of client/server type, based on smaller lower cost equipment including workstations and PC`s, and considering engineering information in a broader sense. This papers reports briefly the experience of the Production Department of Petrobras in transforming its centralized, mainframe based, computational environment into a open distributed client/server computational environment, focusing on the problem of handling technical graphics information regarding its more than 70 fixed offshore platforms.