Running Generic CADD in 2013

One of the surprise hits of my collection of ebooks is "Inside Generic CADD 6." This is a book I wrote for WordWare Press back in 1993 under the title of "Learn Generic CADD 6.0 in a Day." The publisher had an entire series of "Learn in a Day" books, and I wrote for them about AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, Visio, and Generic CADD.

(Recall that Autodesk bought Generic CADD, turned it into Autodesk Retail Products, and then under Carol Batz shut down the division. AutoCAD LT became the intended replacement for Generic CADD users, who may well want to use the General CADD Pro workalike instead.)

Once the Generic CADD book stopped selling, I obtained from WordWare the copyright for it (along with the copyrights for all the other books I wrote for them), and then in 2002 turned it into an ebook. Every few months, I am again pleasantly surprised when someone buys a copy (from here). I suspect it is mostly for nostalgic reasons. After all, this is what the UI looks like:

Yesterday, J.G. bought a copy of the ebook, and then told me this interesting story:

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I have been using Gcadd6 since it came out, now running it on DosEmu on a 32-bit virtual
machine under 64-bit Linux. (It won't run under DosEmu 64-bit.) I have LONG since lost the book and there is still something occasionally I have forgotten or never used.

I switched to Linux before XP came out, but also tried Generic CADD under XP without success. But it works really well under Linux/Dosemu (32 bit). I think probably the authors of Gcadd took some liberties with the video calls, which the emulator for real-mode code under 64-bit Linux does not support -- no emulator is necessary for 32-bit; there is hardware support through the virtual-86 mode, which is not available when running 64-bit.

If you are interested in trying it, the simplest way is to install VMWare player, which is free, and grab a Linux appliance from VMWare (based on some older 32-bit Ubuntu). Install DosEmu, Gcadd, and you are good to go.

 

Comments

[Rakesh Rao]

Indeed, that is a nostalgic post.

Is the old GenericCADD available for download somewhere?

I remember during my first job as a CAD support executive with HCL - then India's only Autodesk distributor, we went around showing GenericCADD to computer-illiterate users, way back in 1989 in India.

[fcsuper]

I'm amazed that using 10 yr. software for CAD is really a thing. Kinda cool, but with free modern 2D CAD applications (even available on Linux), where's the advantage?

[Ralph Grabowski]

Maybe it's equivalent to my 22-year-old daughter playing LPs on a record player and taking film photography with LoMo cameras.

Or, maybe it's not.

[pgreendale]

My father still uses this Software in 2013... the orginal Generic CAD from 1993, running on his P1-100 machine. Its interesting to see him drawing side views etc. I felt a little bis nostalgic when I saw him doing this last time. I got a i5 running Autocad 2013 and all that shiny features included nowadays.