Tag Archives: Nostalgia

Explaining the four tiers of AutoCAD license

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Yesterday’s tiers

Once upon a time, long long ago, you could buy AutoCAD with or without sets of features  called Advanced Drafting Extensions (ADE) containing optional extras such as dimensioning. At one stage you could buy four tiers of AutoCAD license at different prices:

  1. AutoCAD
  2. AutoCAD + ADE1
  3. AutoCAD + ADE2 (incorporating ADE1)
  4. AutoCAD + ADE3 (incorporating ADE1 and ADE2)

(Interestingly, the above situation is similar to the current arrangement with BricsCAD, where BricsCAD Classic, Pro and Platinum are available with incrementing prices and feature sets, with BricsCAD BIM and Sheet Metal available on top of Platinum).

As almost everybody bought AutoCAD + ADE3 anyway, the ADEs were eventually absorbed into the main product and AutoCAD became just AutoCAD again. Later, the AutoCAD line would split again into AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD, and various AutoCAD-based vertical products such as AutoCAD Mechanical and Civil 3D.

Today’s tiers

Fast forward thirty-odd years and AutoCAD licenses are again available in four tiers (even if we ignore AutoCAD LT and Civil 3D). For an AutoCAD 2019 user, these are:

  1. A perpetual license holder who allowed maintenance to lapse after activating AutoCAD 2019.
  2. A perpetual license holder still under maintenance.
  3. A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer prior to the release of AutoCAD 2019.
  4. A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer after the release of AutoCAD 2019 or who started a new full-price subscription at any time.

Note that Tier 1, etc. is my description of the category and not Autodesk’s.

What the tiers mean

This table shows what is available to customers in each of the above tiers:

Tier Perpetual Usage Updates Support Cloud Shared Views Web/Mobile Toolsets
1
2
3
4

Here’s what the table headings mean:

  • Perpetual – a perpetual license that allows continued use into the future without requiring further payment.
  • Usage – rights to use the license at home, use of previous versions and internationally.
  • Updates – formerly known as Service Packs, these bug fixes and minor feature enhancements are withheld from customers who are not actively paying Autodesk.
  • Support – the ability to log a service request that will be addressed by a technician. There are actually multiple levels depending on how much you pay: Basic, Advanced and, for subscription users, the ability to schedule a call to talk to somebody.
  • Cloud – online services such as storage and rendering.
  • Shared Views – formerly available to all AutoCAD 2017 and 2018 users, this feature was renamed, updated and made subscription-only in AutoCAD 2019.
  • Web/Mobile – the AutoCAD Web and AutoCAD Mobile App viewer/markup tools.
  • Toolsets – the ‘Only One AutoCAD’ set of AutoCAD-based verticals now called Specialized Toolsets (excluding Civil 3D). Note that if you’re a customer in Tier 3 who originally had a vertical product (e.g. AutoCAD Mechanical), you will still have access to that toolset and plain AutoCAD, but not the others.

Moving to three tiers

Felice at Autodesk has explained that Autodesk plans to move everybody in Tier 3 to Tier 4 at some point in the future (subject to legal disclaimers). But for now, if you took up the Move to Subscription offer at the wrong time, you don’t yet have access to Specialized Toolsets.

Thanks are due to Felice for patiently answering my questions to clarify the situation and explain the detail.

CAD Nostalgia Video

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For the first video in the new cad nauseam YouTube channel, I’ve had a bit of fun. I unearthed a bunch of my old stuff to show you. Does any of this take you back? Enjoy!

AutoCAD 2018 for Mac – welcome to twenty years ago

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In the past, I’ve described how AutoCAD for Mac was released half-baked (as I predicted) and has remained half-baked ever since.

But wait! Autodesk has proudly announced AutoCAD 2018 for Mac. Skimming through that blog post, I must admit my jaw dropped when I saw some of the new features. This one, for example:

This “new feature” was first provided to AutoCAD users in the 20th century. It was an Express Tool in AutoCAD 2000 (released 1999) and was absorbed into mainstream AutoCAD a few years later. The alias editor goes back even further, to the Release 14 Bonus Tools (1997). That one was absorbed into AutoCAD in 1999. Some of the other new features are also old. Migrating your settings was new back in the century that started without powered flight. Now, not so much.

These features are new to AutoCAD for Mac, of course, and that’s kind of the point. Autodesk is advertising, as new, features that were born before some of the adults who are now using their products.

There are other very important features (e.g. DCL support, essential for LISP compatibility) that date back even longer (Release 12, 1992) and which are still missing from AutoCAD for Mac. That’s right, in some areas AutoCAD for Mac is a quarter of a century behind. And counting.

On the bright side, you do now get access to the pointlessly-changed 2018 DWG format. A couple of features are reasonably new additions, but they represent a small subset of the small number of minor improvements in AutoCAD 2017 and 2018 for Windows. If anything, the rate of improvement of AutoCAD for Mac is lagging behind even the glacial progress of AutoCAD for Windows, despite starting from a much lower base point.

I note with interest that Autodesk’s comparison page is now hiding the detail of the differences between the full product and AutoCAD for Mac. I guess if you have two identically-priced products and one’s missing a bunch of stuff, you might be tempted to hide the fact from your potential customers. This post of mine from last year will give you some idea of what Autodesk’s not telling you about what’s missing from AutoCAD for Mac. Clue: it’s a lot.

Mac users pay full price for their product and deserve much better than this. If you want information on a full-featured “AutoCAD for Mac”, don’t bother looking for it from Autodesk. Try Bricsys instead.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 5 – summary

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In this final post of the series, I’ll examine the patterns that have emerged from the upgrade history I rated in parts 1 to 4. Bear in mind I’m only assessing the DOS (up to R13) and Windows (from R12 on) versions of the full version of AutoCAD. Of course, this only represents my opinion of those releases and is bound to be biased by the uses I and my users have for the software. Your experiences and opinions will almost certainly vary.

What can I say? My assessment is based on a third of a century of experience, and I’ve tried to be as objective as I can. I’m not unique in perceiving the decline of the AutoCAD upgrade; you’ll see the same said by long-standing customers and experienced independents all over the place. Ralph Grabowski, for example:

The new feature list for AutoCAD’s annual “big-R” release has become so short that I stopped producing my annual “What’s Inside? AutoCAD” ebook series in 2013.

 
Back to my own assessment, here’s a graph that shows how I rated the releases:

One thing’s obvious and that’s the permanent drop in the rate of improvement that set in with the onset of the annual release cycle. My average rating for AutoCAD Version 2.0 to 2000 is 7.7. For 2000i to 2017, it’s 3.4. Autodesk switched to doing half as much worthwhile development between releases, but charged the same upgrade fee. Value for money halved.

We entered the era of an endless stream of annual releases with fewer genuinely useful new features. Worse, the abbreviated cycle meant most of those features went into production half-baked in design, implementation or both. Some of those undercooked features (the lucky ones) got some attention in the next release. Many more of them never got fixed, or got quietly removed later, or eventually got patched up years after the user base had ignored them to death.

Have a look at the decline from 2010 downwards. The average for the last five releases is 2.0. The rate of improvement per release, starting from a low point, took a nose dive. Value for money, which was poor, is now dire.

Conclusion? AutoCAD is in maintenance mode. Autodesk’s attention (and investment) is elsewhere and it is just going through the motions of updating the software. Progress has stalled. Inspiration is AWOL.

Nevertheless, through all this, we have still paid for new releases in various ways, and in huge numbers. No wonder Autodesk is convinced we’ll be silly enough to pay over the odds to rent software; there’s a precedent.

The more Autodesk has moved away from the optional upgrade model, through optional maintenance*, then effectively compulsory maintenance**, then finally to the compulsory rental model***, the weaker the upgrades have become. Autodesk no longer feels compelled to put in the development effort that will convince customers to shell out for the advantages provided by a new release.

Autodesk wants an endless revenue stream in return for merely providing access to the software, rather than as a reward for improving it: money for nothing. That’s Autodesk’s dream, and an understandable one. For customers, it’s a nightmare: nothing for money.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

* Maintenance was previously called VIP and then Subscription.
** Autodesk restricted the availability of upgrades, priced it out of the market, and in some cases only sold perpetual licenses bundled with maintenance, before finally eliminating upgrades altogether.
*** Autodesk’s third attempt at rental (there were failed attempts in 2001 and 2013) was first called Desktop Subscription and then just subscription. I generally call it rental to avoid confusion with The Maintenance Formerly Known as Subscription.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 4

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 4, I rate AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.

  • AutoCAD 2011 (March 2010): 5 – Object transparency was a very important enhancement for some. The X-Ray and other visual styles made 3D editing more efficient. Object visibility (independent of layers) was handy but has confused some DWG recipients ever since. Selection Cycling, Add selected and Select Similar (which had been in AutoCAD-based verticals for a while) were true productivity enhancers. Geometric constraints were improved but still confined to 2D, as they are to this day. Finally, Autodesk’s first of several failed attempts at an online Help system meant this wasn’t such a good release as it could have been.
  • AutoCAD 2012 (March 2011): 4 – Array enhancements were a good idea, reverting to the 80s for their user interface was less smart. Content Explorer was woeful in just about every way, but provided some otherwise unavailable searching features. I found the in-canvas controls of benefit. Support for ECW files was important to my users. The Auto-command entry was a good idea that worked well enough in this release (but performs increasingly poorly with each new release, to the point where I can’t tolerate it these days). There were a few 3D enhancements. Yet another (the 12th?) 3D to 2D method was added, Model Documentation, which as usual for a major new feature wasn’t nearly finished. Don’t get me started on the nudge feature. Moving CAD vector objects around by effectively random amounts based on pixel sizes was as dumb an idea as I can remember. Help still sucked.
  • AutoCAD 2013 (March 2012): 3 – This release ushered in a new API and DWG format as expected. Less expected was this DWG format lasting 5 releases, which was a bonus out here in user land. There were a bunch of Cloud features destined to be ignored by most but very useful to some. Model Documentation improved almost to the point of production usability, but has stayed stuck at the almost-there stage ever since. Help got even worse and has never recovered. Property preview and lots of minor tinkering with various features were worthwhile but didn’t add up to enough to make this a must-have release; needing compatibility with the new DWG format was more likely to do that.
  • AutoCAD 2014 (March 2013): 2 – A basic free file tabs utility was pulled into the core without improvement, a disappointment to those of us used to much better functionality from 3rd party developers. There were some security enhancements that got in the way for many people, but without addressing the main security problem (automatic loading of code from implicit paths at startup). The command line grew in functionality and got slower (again), and there was a bit more minor tinkering here and there. Creating clockwise arcs would have been impressive in the mid 80s, but here only showed how slow Autodesk had become at fixing long-standing functionality issues.
  • AutoCAD 2015 (March 2014): 2 – Lasso was a useful change, as were improved dragging and selection. Unless you’re into point clouds, there’s not much else here of practical use, though. Application Manager was the first step down the dark path leading us to the attempted automatic update doom that lay ahead, and gets no points from me. Darkening the default appearance of the interface to resemble Paint Shop Pro from 2007 was no substitute for substance. At least it was optional. The removal of the option to use textual status bar toggles wasn’t optional. It represented a particularly petty piece of Autodesk interface arrogance and a classic example of Autodesk breaking the unbroken while leaving the broken broken. The New Tab (later called Start) was terribly slow and best bypassed. It’s unfortunate that Autodesk made an API change here, breaking from the established pattern of changing both DWG and API every three years.
  • AutoCAD 2016 (March 2015): 2 – Those people who found a use for the execrable Content Explorer would have been upset by its removal. I wasn’t. Geometric osnap, improved revision clouds, dimension command changes, PDF and point cloud improvements, ability to attach Navisworks files, not much else. No API or DWG change, which was good, but nothing much to see here, move along please.
  • AutoCAD 2017 (March 2016): 1 – Graphics performance, which to Autodesk’s credit has been quietly but significantly improved in recent years, got another boost. Performance in other areas has continued to get worse. Just starting up an older AutoCAD release or a competitor’s product is like a breath of fresh air and shows how bloated, slow and inefficient AutoCAD has become. Share Design View was useful to some, within its limitations. PDF import was sometimes useful and a nice-to-have; done to a higher standard than we have come to expect, it was improved further in 2017.1. Dialog box size enhancements were welcome but at least 10 years overdue. Autodesk desktop app is notable only for its awfulness. Terrible idea, dreadful implementation. Migration was finally looked at 11 years after it was broken, and about 8 years after I permanently gave up on it. I didn’t even bother testing the new version because I’ve arranged things so I can do very nicely without it, thanks. Associative centerlines and marks were a potentially good idea but the implementation was atrocious. Deliberately removing 192,192,192 transparency from button icons was an act of sheer bastardry that was worth at least -1 just on its own. Another API change after only 2 years was an inconvenience but at least 2017 kept the 2013 DWG format for the 5th release in a row, probably the best thing Autodesk has done for AutoCAD customers in recent years. Long may that continue.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 3

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 3, I rate AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.

  • AutoCAD 2004 (March 2003): 5 -The return of Express tools was a good start. Better still, Autodesk’s abortive attempt to sell Express Tools as an extra meant some effort had been put into improving them and they were much bigger and better in 2004 than they were in 2000. The death of the annoying UI stuff didn’t come a moment too soon. This upgrade had a few other useful additions and the new DWG format was more efficient, but overall nothing to get too excited about.
  • AutoCAD 2005 (March 2004): 4 – Autodesk introduced the Sheet Set Manager with this release; I guess one day they’ll get around to finishing it. Likewise, tables were useful but still imperfect today. Improved hatching. Fields. No DWG or API change. Mediocre.
  • AutoCAD 2006 (March 2005): 5 – Dynamic blocks (2D only) and in-place block editing came along with a bunch of extra palettes to make this a decent release in terms of new functionality. No DWG or API change. Big changes to customization, though, with the CUI command and format. CAD Managers had some serious rethinking to do. Migrating settings never worked properly for me in a custom environment from this release on. Losing the ability to easily customize toolbars directly on-screen was a pain; despite some advantages the CUI interface was excruciatingly slow, with a poor UI and bugs that remain to this day. No DWG or API change. This is the release where I really started to notice AutoCAD performance start to decline as a result of bloat and/or poor development, a trend that was to continue long-term and affects the value (and my rating) of each upgrade.
  • AutoCAD 2007 (March 2006): 6 – The Dashboard (later to become the Ribbon), visual styles, many 3D improvements, better rendering and new 3D to 2D methods make this a decent upgrade that 3D users in particular wouldn’t want to do without. The new DWG format and API version were inconvenient, but by now an expected part of the cycle.
  • AutoCAD 2008 (March 2007): 2 – Table enhancements were very handy for people using huge tables in their drawings, and most of the text enhancements were welcome. Annotative scaling was the big drawcard in this release, but Autodesk released it unfinished and therefore got it very wrong. The _XREF _XREF _XREF bug infested drawings and led to all kinds of apparently unrelated problems that persisted for years. Multileaders were another one of those good ideas that Autodesk insists on implementing badly, in this case by splitting off the styles from dimension styles and causing backward compatibility issues. The unreconciled layer warnings proved annoying for most and harder to turn off than they should have been. Overall, AutoCAD 2008 was a release to skip, even if you had paid for it.
  • AutoCAD 2009 (March 2008): 6 – The Ribbon release, and arrival of the Big Red A. The Ribbon was horribly slow and some people thought Autodesk should have dealt more with substance than appearance, but there were many other changes (mainly UI) that provided a genuine practical benefit. I think the ViewCube is awesome; the steering wheel, not so much. On the negative side was the mass of “idiot box” dialogs that kept popping up to interrupt your flow. You could turn them off, but not pre-emptively. The massive tooltips that repeatedly rose up to obscure everything were beyond annoying. The layer palette would have been good had it not been such a performance drag. Autodesk put a lot of effort into Action Recorder but failure to listen to what people wanted in a macro recorder meant that effort was wasted on a flop.
  • AutoCAD 2010 (March 2009): 6 – Lots of effort was put into 3D, particularly some clever work with surfaces. Geometric constraints were big news, but not as big as they could have been had they not been restricted to 2D. A downside to this release was that it removed the do-it-yourself inter-PC license transfer mechanism and introduced a web-based method that requires Autodesk’s ongoing cooperation (and existence). Better PDF support and non-rectangular viewports and xref clipping were welcome. Less welcome was Initial Setup, another of Autodesk’s many reviled attempts to get in your face at startup rather than letting you draw. This Ribbon was better than its predecessor, but still a Ribbon so most users ignored it. The new DWG format and API version were inconvenient but expected. Deserves some credit for being the last AutoCAD release with a decent Help system.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 2

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 2, I rate AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.

  • AutoCAD Release 12 (June 1992): 9 – Big, big changes. A mass of UI and other improvements. Lots of new dialog boxes. The first release that retained its predecessor’s DWG format, which was very handy. DCL gave LISP and C programmers the ability to create dialog box commands. The first usable Windows version (the R11 extension version was a shocker). Came with a Bonus CD full of extra stuff; a big deal in those days of limited connectivity. Autodesk’s upgrade amnesty (upgrade from any earlier release for $500 in the USA) made this extremely strong value for money, too.

    • AutoCAD Release 13 (November 1994): 6 – Many of you will remember this most infamous of all AutoCAD releases. Too ambitious, long overdue yet released too early, full of bugs, terribly unreliable, markedly slower than its predecessor. Why have I still given it 6? Because of all the many highly useful UI improvements and drafting features it introduced; there were such a huge mass of them I won’t even attempt a summary. Because when running on NT and decent hardware it wasn’t actually that unreliable; running on 16-bit Windows was to blame for a lot of crashes. Because by the time of the final version (R13c4a – the twelfth!), it was not that bad at all, and because Autodesk provided excellent customer service by sending R13c4 out on CD to every registered customer. Because it introduced ARX, allowing C++ developers to do things with AutoCAD that had been impossible before. Because it came with a huge slab of printed documentation (sorry, rainforests). With lots to like as well as dislike, Release 13 was the ultimate curate’s egg release.
    • AutoCAD Release 14 (February 1997): 9 – A big performance effort, masses of bug fixes and many other practical improvements (e.g. hatching, draw order, fully functional object properties toolbar) mark this out as the sort of release that people remember for all the right reasons. The new stuff in this release was added because it would be useful to customers, not because it looked good in an advertisement. Bonus (later Express) Tools gave us a lot of handy stuff, even if it wasn’t officially supported. R14 was an upgrade done right.
    • AutoCAD 2000 (March 1999): 8 – A CAD application being able to open more than one drawing at a time might seem an obvious requirement, but it took until this release for us to get it, and very glad of it we were too. The property palette, layer dialog and lots of right-click options represented worthwhile UI improvements. The integration of Visual LISP (acquired during the R14 cycle as Vital LISP) and access to ActiveX functionality represented a revolution for LISP programmers. Very good upgrade.
    • AutoCAD 2000i (July 2000): -2 – What a difference a year makes! Yes, a that’s minus two for this initial attempt at an annual release (Autodesk didn’t make the timing work for another couple of releases). An emphasis on largely irrelevant-to-users Internet features intended to make Autodesk look all hip and now (anyone tried to access the Point A site lately?), a tie-in to Internet Explorer, annoyingly intrusive UI changes and the removal of the Express Tools, together with a dearth of genuinely useful new features (double-click editing being a noble exception) made this an upgrade only in name. The new Autodesk logo failed to wow customers, who stayed away in droves (at the time we still had that option, and exercised it when we failed to see value for money in an upgrade). A joke at the time was that the ‘i’ stood for ‘ignore’. Worst. Upgrade. Ever.
    • AutoCAD 2002 (June 2001): 3 – The bad things in 2000i were still there in 2002, so that’s a net 0. At least it retained the AutoCAD 2000/2000i DWG format in what was to become a regular 3-year DWG/API cycle, useful for customers and developers. The handful of useful additions (e.g. more associative dimension stuff) didn’t add up to much of an upgrade. At least it was an upgrade, in contrast to the downgrade its immediate predecessor represented.

    Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
    Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
    Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
    Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
    Part 5 – Summary.

    Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

    • 33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 1

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    In this series of posts I will look back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10.

    This is not a rating of the software in absolute terms, it’s a relative rating of the upgrade. That is, the improvement the software made on its predecessor. AutoCAD 2000i is a much better piece of software than AutoCAD Release 2.5, and given the choice I would rather use the former, no contest. But as an upgrade, 2000i sucked and 2.5 rocked. The biggest improving upgrade is the benchmark and gets 10; the others are rated in comparison. If a release is worse overall than its predecessor, it goes into minus territory.

    In part 1, I rate AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11. This is not quite a full assessment of all AutoCAD upgrades because my AutoCAD experience started with AutoCAD Version 1.4 and there were releases before that, even if they only sold in tiny numbers.

    • AutoCAD Version 1.4 (October 1983): No rating because I didn’t use its predecessor, but if you consider that before this you couldn’t even remove a section of a line, this upgrade ushered in probably the first realistically usable version of AutoCAD.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.0 (October 1984): 8 – Very significant improvements including osnaps, linetypes, rubber banding for a bunch of commands, relative coordinate display, attributes, etc.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.1 (May 1985): 10 – AutoLISP, arguably the most significant new feature in AutoCAD history, came along during the 2.1 era (complete implementation took until 2.18). AutoCAD was the PC CAD leader because of its open architecture; AutoLISP opened that up a lot further and took AutoCAD from leader to winner. The beginnings of 3D, along with a host of other great improvements, made this, for me, the ultimate upgrade in AutoCAD history.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.5 (June 1986): 10 – Large numbers of important new drafting features especially editing and much better undo, along with a maturing of AutoLISP and significant performance improvements, made this a fantastic upgrade too.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.6 (April 1987): 4 – A bit of a stopgap release pending some UI changes to come, but some worthwhile additions such as transparent zoom, point filters and associative dimensions. Not in the same league as the previous few upgrades, though.
    • AutoCAD Release 9 (September 1987): 6 – The UI got a big and useful overhaul including the introduction of pull-down menus. Some very handy things were added to help menu macros work better. Limited in scope by the short timeframe from the previous release, this upgrade was good but not great.
    • AutoCAD Release 10 (October 1988): 8 – Lots of 3D enhancements including UCS and meshes are the highlight here. Viewports helped make 3D drafting more practical and a few AutoLISP enhancements helped make this a worthwhile upgrade. Decent working extended memory functions helped DOS users, particularly as more complex drawings were becoming increasingly common.
    • AutoCAD Release 11 (October 1990): 7 – Superficially identical to its predecessor, this upgrade gave us many improvements that weren’t immediately obvious, particularly two revolutionary (for AutoCAD) features: paper space and xrefs. ADS gave developers a C-based API (actually introduced in R10 OS/2, but DOS was the important one then).

    Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
    Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
    Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
    Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
    Part 5 – Summary.

    Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

    My first computer

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    My first computer was a Dragon 32, which I think I bought in 1982. With a massive 32 kilobytes of RAM and a proper typewriter keyboard, it was quite advanced for a home computer of the time. The Commodore 64 may have had more RAM, but a lot of it was grabbed by its very basic BASIC. I preferred a computer with an ELSE to go with its IF, thanks. Microsoft Extended BASIC for me, not the crummy old BASIC 2.0 of the Commodore. The Commodore 64 was one of the great consumer electronics sales successes of all time. The Dragon, er, wasn’t. It lasted less than two years before the Welsh parent company went under.

    Inside, it was pretty much a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer. Outside, it was this:

    Dragon 32

    I cut my coding teeth on this beast. The first thing I did with it was to write a parametric 3D bottle design program. I later spent several all-nighters developing what I thought was an awesome space game in BASIC using its limited graphics. I bought a plug-in cartridge that provided me with assembly language facilities. Real nerd stuff.

    I sold it to a co-worker just before the company collapsed and replaced it with a Sinclair QL, another great commercial success story. I still have that QL (broken), and another one I bought much later as a replacement. I must get it out one day and see if it still works.

    What was your first computer?