Goeke@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (03/21/85)
Let me set the stage: We need to do a fair amount of serious
drafting, especially mechanical but some electrical -- including simple
PC boards. We looked at the grand market and found many
$100K/workstation things and two <$10K/workstation things: VeraCad and
AutoCad. They both run on IBM PCs and close equivalents (you need an
8087, >384K memory, color, a $200 mouse, and an $800 plotter for B
sheets -- which, non-intuitively, is adequate for almost anything we
do). The software itself is only $2000; many copies have been sold
(>10K for AutoCad) which means it has been well tested, both in
operation and documentation. We chose AutoCad, but it was a close call.
At first we ran it on a borrowed Baby Blue PC, but now its time to buy
three stations of our own.
Drafting programs work best if you have a maximally fast
machine for redrawing on the machine (a typical redraw on our Blue take
40 s). It is /necessary/ for production work to have at least 640 X 400
pixels with 8 colors (the colors are used for "windowing" different
layers of a drawing). AutoCad only runs on MS-DOS machines, but a lot
of them. What we found best was an NEC APC III: wonderful color on a
640 X 400 bit-mapped screen running an 8 MHz 8086 and selling for $3K
including a 10MB hard disk built-in. The drawbacks: neither their bus
nor their BIOS is a Blue clone. Vanilla MS-DOS programs on Blue 5"
disks load and run, at least. Since we're buying these machines for a
single usage station, we think speed and display outweigh the drawbacks.
(We'll also probably buy some for dedicated word processing, but those
stations will be single usage, too; the tilt-and-swivel display was a
big plus with my secretary.)
Does anyone out there have one of these things, or maybe even
a predecessor. We are interested in comments about reliability,
support, and questions we forgot to ask. Please reply to me direct. I
can summarize to the net in a couple of weeks.
Bob Goeke
[ Goeke @ MIT-Multics.ARPA ]
MIT Center for Space Research
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-253-1910