[AT] OT Computers and programs

[James Peck]

I have a free version of DraftSight on this laptop. DraftSight was a brilliant move by the folks that own SolidWorks to put a big hurt in Autodesk. A couple of years ago I used DraftSight to redraw a very large single surviving paper copy of the hydraulic circuit of a 1200 ton hydraulic press. The file was a dwg file and could be opened and edited with AutoCAD.  I used my laptop because I did not have admin privileges to load DraftSight on my work desktop. I was able to store the resulting  file on the server.

My DraftSight will now operate only when I am online. The official notice is that the free versions will quit operating in 2020.

I do own AutoCAD 2000, the last version you can own. I run it on a home desktop under windows 7 XPMODE.. It will not load under Windows 10. That is inconvenient.

[James Peck] I registered for a ProE class at El Paso Community College to start in early 2000. When I got to the first class, it was cancelled due to low enrollment.

[Stephen Offiler] I got into 3D CAD in 1997 with Parametric Technologies Corp's Pro/Engineer software.  It was (disclaimer, I am working from 21-year old memories) originally developed to run on Unix workstations.  It was ported to run under Windows NT, which wasn't exactly the same beast as the consumer-flavored versions of Windows at that time.  Pro/E's user interface suffered from simply being not-Windows, just not as familiar and intuitive - no where close in fact.  It was a lot of work to get proficient with Pro/E.  But at that time my boss was playing a lot of golf with the local Solidworks VAR (value-added reseller, basically the local rep).  Once we were a few years deep into Pro/E, with a growing database of new projects developed under Pro/E plus a lot of conversion from legacy 2D CAD as well as even older manual drawings - we were in DEEP and I resisted the change mightily.  I lost, of course.  We adopted Solidworks in 2002-3, and never looked back.  The UI was fully Windows-compliant and the learning curve was very smooth.  I still run Solidworks pretty much daily and I would highly recommend it.
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