WorldCAD Access

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.

 

GStarSoft tells us the number of downloads

I dunno if it is a bug or if it is deliberate, but GStarSoft's download pages report the numbers downloaded of each software package, and they may make interesting reading for those so inclined.

From www.gstarcad.net/download_143.html, here are the numbers for the 30-day demos:

Desktop Software 

• GstarCAD 2011 Pro = 40,033 downloads
  
  
• GstarCAD 2011 Std = 26,542
  
  
• GstarCAD 2012 = 28,770

Verticals

• AEC = 15,429
  
  
• Mechanical = 405
  
  
• Manufacturing = 1,070
  
  
• HVAC & Piping = 4,304
  
  
• Electrical = 7,562
  
  
• GIS, Survey = 6,772

Mobile Client Software

• GstarCAD MC for iOS = 2,045
  
  
• GstarCAD MC for Android = 1,187

 

All-time top-3 stories in WorldCAD Access (well, since 2007)

I'm using FeedBurner to track the number of readers of this blog (which last week reached 8,535, up from 717 five years ago.). This Google service also records other interesting stats, like the most popular articles. It turns out they were the following:

1. In upFront.eZine this week: All about Creo (part i) and the CAD Mac market

2. The battle over ".dwg" ends next week, Thursday

3. In upFront.eZine this week: This is where Dassault Systemes is going; also, SpaceClaim 2011

The top-3 ways of reading this blog are...

1. Google Feedfetcher
2. Netvibes
3. Bloglines

As for where readers reside, well, no surprise that United States is #1. The next top-3 countries are the following:

2. United Kingdom
3. Japan
4. Israel

The drawback of Feedburner's by-country report is that it is for the last full day only, and so the ranking is probably atypical. Here's the map Google generates of countries from which readers arrive:

I was disappointed that Feedburner reported, "There were no Uncommon Uses of your feed during this time period."

The price of a CAD workstation in 1981

From R.Rhea via Bill Fane comes this invoice for a CAD workstation in 1981. I've left out the customer and sales firm.

I couldn't find a picture of the Omnitech TM-1 workstation, although Omnitech is still around and today produces CNC machines. Here is a picture of the Techtronix display, which was a vector display -- it displayed graphics as bright lines on the green background. (Unlike today's raster displays, it needed no memory to remember the display refresh.) I remember using one in about 1980 while still at university.

 

Here is a picture of the CalComp flatbed plotter (both pix from Wikipedia). It's nearly as tall as a person:

 

 

 

The Internet opens horizons on information; newspapers don't

Peter Preston  of The Observer and Guardian newspapers writes, "If you choose your own news, you'll be less well read." His argument is that all that information on the interwebs allows people to limit their reading to items that confirm their biases. He feels that readers of newspapers, in contrast, gain by coming across articles "by accident" to which they would otherwise not have been exposed.

His argument is made from desperation, as the Internet opens horizons on information kept scarce by newspapers and broadcasters. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s being information-frustrated in northern Canada, since our primary  source was limited to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose creed still today seems to be, "Everyone A Victim."

Once the Internet became reality for everyday people in the mid-1990s, I could peruse many  information sources, both broad (from many countries) and narrow (my interests in tech and philosophy). Every day now, I read news voraciously for a couple of hours. I no longer watch or listen to the CBC, because I generally know more about any particular story than do their news readers with their faux-authoritative voices.

Contra Mr Preston, the Internet is what causes us to be "less well read" no longer. By their very nature, it is newspapers and news broadcasts that cause subscribers and listeners to be "less well read." Newspapers are limited by the number of pages, which is determined by the amount of advertising pulled in, while radio and tv are limited by time. Even the BBC, the wealthiest of all news organizations, repeats its stories hour after hour, limiting the amount of news it makes available. A caption in Mr Preston's column (available on line, imagine that!) repeats the gentle lie with which newspaper people console each other: "Print newspapers bring you everything."

Mr Preston forgets that every day newspaper editors and broadcaster producers choose which news to report, and so leave out vast swaths of information. We are forced to turn to the digital media to fill in the gaps created by Mr Preston and his fellow workers.

Mr Preston's plea is not new. It has been voiced before. It belongs to the group of elitists who worry that that this new-fangled digital media prevents them from imposing their point of view on the rest of the world. He yearns for a return to yesteryear, when he could choose your news for you. As he complains in his column, "Digital intrinsically insists on choice." To see information choice as negative is evil. 

PS: Where did I learn of Mr Preston's lament? Not from accidentally running across it in a printed paper, but from this digital source: http://mediagazer.com/120103/h1335

There are some who would say that there is no Web 2.0 bubble

Bookmark this! 

The future of social networking, as explained by infographics

The trend seems to be that GUIs are defenestrating, kinda like Unix & DOS used to be

GUIs = graphical user interfaces

Defenestrating = elimination of openings, specifically windows

It was the brainiacs at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center that first came up with the new ideas of how  to interface to computers that we all use today: mouse, windowed programs on the screen, white background/black text, and so on.

Until then, the norm was keyboard only, one program running at a time that monopolized the screen, monochrome text on black background.

But the trend is now reversing:

- the most popular computer in the world today is the smartphone: no mouse, no windows.

- Apple has said it wants to port its full-screen interface from iOS (iPhone) to Mac OS X: no windows

- Linux-based MeeGo effectively eliminates windows from its UI.

I wonder if this trend will become the new norm, or just an interesting aside in the history of computing.

When executives grant interviews and then sidestep questions

If you can't comment, then why grant an interview?

Engadget: Your new CEO, Leo Apotheker, said recently in an interview with the BBC that the devices announced at this event would ship "within weeks" -- that clearly isn't the case. Can you explain?

Steven McArthur, vp of applications and services, HP: I can't comment on that. I don't know the context. We're going to work on getting these products out as fast as we can.

Engadget: Okay, but you said summer. Early summer, late summer?

Steven: We are anxious to get a fantastic product into folks' hands as fast as possible.

Source.

 

 

photo of the sunday: where the plants grow

A seed found its home in the knot of this nylon rope holding a dock in place on Lake Kawkawa outside of Hope, BC. I took this photo in May, 2009.