info-mac@uw-beaver (01/11/85)
From: KSPROUL@RUTGERS.ARPA I have now had a better chance to look out the D.E. circuit board program,,, It has a few catches, but nothing that it unreasonable and is overall a VERY good program!!!! Following are the two letters that came with this program from D.E. (the reason I am sending this to the net is that I have had enough enquires about this to warrant it...) ----- letter from Douglas Electronics Inc... December 21, 1984 Dear Customer Enclosed is the Printed Circuit Board Layout and Manufacturaing System disk which you recently ordered. We designed this product in order to provide our customers with quick turn-around on quality circuit boards manufactured at reasonable prices. the response to this product has far outreached our highest expectations. We are obviously pleased to have received such a good reception to a new product; however, we are anticipating some problems. Today we are shipping about 450 copes of the program. If very many of you return with orders for circuit boards whithin the next few weeks, we are not going to be in a position to handle the orders. In order to better serve your needs we have taken several steps: 1. We have on order new equipment which will give us increased manufacturing capacity. 2. We are making arrangments with orhter manufacturers to help handle the overflow work. 3. We have entered into an exclusive marketing agreement with Bishop Graphics, Inc. for our printed cirtuit software. Under the bishop Graphics name, several enhancements will e added to the system. The most important enhancement will be the ability to enable other circuit board manufactures to produce circuit boards from the system. (The following was underlined) PLEASE NOTE: The special price of $10.00 (plus shipping and handling) is no longer avvailable. Also, the disk contains copyrighted software, the disk is copy protected, and we expect you to honor the copy protection. (end of underlined text) All inquire`ies about future orders for the software are being directed to Bishop Graphics (818) 991-2600. Any inquirey about the program which you now have, or request for manufacturing of boards from the program should be directed to Douglas Electronics at (415) 483-8770. Sincerely and Thank you, Douglas Electronics ------ letter from Bishop Graphics---- December 19, 1984 Dear Douglas Customer: Bishop Graphics, INC. would like to thank you for your response to, and your interest in, the Douglas Electronics Printed Circuit Board Layout and Manufacturing System. By licensing this product from Douglas Electronics, you are no also eleigible for an exclusive future offer from Bishop Grahics, as described below. As you are probably already arware, Bishop Graphics, Inc. is the world's leading supplier of PCB design aids. Bishop is now pleased to annonunce that we have just become the exclusive worldwide marketer of all future Douglas PCB software and products. And bishop will soon be offering both software and related hardware for low-cost, yet highly effective CAD systems for printed circuit board layout and design. We'd like you to know that in the near furture, Bishop plans to announce and release a vastly enhanced version of the Douglas PCB Layout and Manufacturing System software that you have just received in its initial form. Tghis new version will e marketed under the Bishop name, and amongh those items currently planned for the Bishop's release are: Increased productivity, a full-board checkprint capability for the Apple Imagewriter, higher- resolution pen plooter output, and "Gerber-compatible" photo- plotter output. As one of the first licensees of the initial Douglas software, you will e offered the new, ehanced and expanded Bishop version at a significantly reduced price as soon as it becomes available. This special reduced-price offereing will NOT be made available to anyone else. Your name has already been entered on to a special list of preferred Bishop CAD customers, and you will automatically receive all future announcements on Bishop's upcoming PCB software enhancements and related Bishop PCB CAD systems products. Sincerely, David L. Peltz VP of Sales and Marketing Bishop Graphics CAD Systems Corp --- end of bishop letter.... I think that this program system has a GOOD chance of becoming a de-facto standard for low-end cost PCB layout!!!! BUT !!!! Bishop Graphics had better not charge to high of a price for the system.... Also, there is a good chance that the company my brother works for will by a MAC just for this program.... We (he) is going to try it out on my MAC, get the board made, and if it works out well, get one and use it for their board layout... Keith Sproul Ksproul@Rutgers.arpa as usual, I have no connection to either company, I just think that this is one heck of a fantastic pice of software.... -------
info-mac@uw-beaver (01/24/85)
From: tektronix!hplabs!hpda!dmsd!bass@uw-beaver.arpa
I have been using the PC Cad program for about 2 weeks tring to do a
6 X 11" single board micro layout. The program is a GREAT start at
a PC CAD tool for the MAC. But I use the word START more strongly
than you might observe .... after talking with management at DE ... they
have several development efforts underway for improvements requested
by Bishop .... they expect BG to market the program in the $200-$300
range with the plotter and interchange file stuff added. That will
be a REAL Bargin.
Now the the bad parts ... the program uses VERY poor update algorithms
for redrawing the screen, handling windows, and doing scrolling ... and
is impossibly SLOW. A 4 X 9 memory array tightly interconnected requires
more than several seconds to redraw ... and since layout requires zooming
in on a small section of the board and any movement redraws the screen ...
every action with that many objects takes 6-10 seconds minimum.
When I talked to DE about the problem they responded that they hadn't intended
it to be used for such large designs .... I would guess that a 10 to 20
chip board is about the practical limit untill the next release ... unless
you have a lot of time to spend waiting for it to redraw.
Besides the problem of it not being useful for real product sized boards ..
25-45 chip boards ... its only other problems are VERY MINOR glitchs
like tring to grab the scroll boxes sometimes causes it to jump when
you close the mouse button (like it thought the pointer was not over
a box).
Since the problems should be easy to fix I would give them an A+ on
overall design and effort and an A- on implementation.
Waiting the the next release from BG ...
John
---
John Bass
DMS Design (System Performance and Arch Consultants)
{dual,fortune,idi,hpda}!dmsd!bass (408) 996-0557