GreenPat said...

"Dad, I dug a hole."



"It's filling up with water."

(p.s. Not my design, non-proprietary sample data)

Ewwwwwweee... That looks like Surpac

Kiteboy, I know a local 'drafty' that uses a program called 'Generic Cad'...in DOS, on an 18yo PC! 1992 was his last upgrade before the software went to a Windows OS system, and has since been replaced by 'General Cad'. His argument is that his database setup in DOS is better than any other OS around. I worked for him for a couple of months, but spent many hours converting details & drawings from GCD to DWG so I could use it with Autocad. I have to admit though, he knew the workings of his PC, the speed of the software was impressive (no delays) and I never saw a crash...but was a nightmare for a guy like me who only has very little knowledge of programming!

Sailhack said...

Kiteboy, I know a local 'drafty' that uses a program called 'Generic Cad'...in DOS, on an 18yo PC! ....

That's hilarious. It's still around too..
www.generalcadd.com/

and even funnier, they want $600 bucks for it, and justify it by saying 'we're better business people than the ones who used to sell it cheaper'. You can sign up to TAFE and buy a student licence of Autocad for less than that!

www.generalcadd.com/price1.htm#Thinking out loud about pricing...

For what it's worth when some crusty old engineer pops up using something obscure we always refer to it as as 'CrapiCAD' and I think we have a new winner for the very definition of 'CrapiCAD'.

Autocad 3d...brrr, bad memories. 3 years ago whilst completing my dip. we (students) had to base our year's work on a BDAV competition (Building Designers Association of Vic student comp). A 3-storey commercial property on a difficult (real) site in Melb.

To cut a long story short, other schools had implemented BIM software into their curriculum, whilst we had 'Autocad 3d', and some ordinary teachers!!! It basically took 6 months to model a 3-storey building, all walls, floors, ceilings, windows (frames, glazing & hardware in each window) joinery, furniture, fittings (I even modeled the towels hanging on the rails in the amenity rooms). Once modeled, the rendering started. I remember the day leading up to presentation, setting the image to render and my alarm clock for every 3 hours (during the night). The school's PCs crashed continually, and it was hell! To cap it off, the next 3 months was spent creating the working drawings for the same building, so witnessed many PC crashes...aarrrgghh!

Side-note - the upside was that I won the comp & represented the school at the awards night, only to be smashed by a very talented young guy from another school that produced an extremely high level of architecture...he was also previously 'recruited' into one of Melb's best Architectural practices, (I would generally say well-done to the kid, but when a few of us went to shake his hand after the awards, he turned up his nose and said he "had to go for the photo shoot, so don't have time to talk" - prat!