WorldCAD Access

How I Came to Write 39 Books About BricsCAD. And Make 161 Videos

Opinion Sometimes, it’s useful to look back to see where you came from, and why you are the way you are today. You may well find a thread of events, of decision trees, and of opportunities taken -- or avoided. The most convoluted for me, perhaps, was how I came to produce so many books and training videos about BricsCAD. Each time an outside event changed my direction, I've noted it below as (Decision Tree). 1991: From AutoCAD to Corel Draw It began with Corel Draw. Or, rather, it didn’t. (Decision Tree.) In 1991, Wordware Publishing asked me to write... Read more →

Repairing a 42-year-old Loudspeaker

Opinion In the 1970s and 1980s, when it was fashion to have big component stereo systems, and whenever my dad asked me to buy him another component, I’d use the opportunity to spend his money on stereo equipment that, in those days, I found interesting. Back then, components typically cost $300-$400 each -- multiply those by 3 for the cost in today’s inflated money. A typical stereo setup that a university student bought himself had a receiver (pre-amp, amplifier, and tuner in one), a tape deck, a turntable and a pair of speakers. So, we’re looking at nearly $4,000 in... Read more →

David Levin Passes On the Torch

Opinion The primary source of CAD information in Russia had been Isicad, which published a magazine (see cover below), hosted a Web site with news and articles, ran conferences, and operated a Telegram chat group. Last year, owner David Levin relocated to Tel Aviv -- from one war zone to another. Now he's looking to hand the content of the Web site's 2,126 articles to a Russian entity free of charge, provided it promises to maintain it. Sample Web page of online PLM database More info at https://isicad-ru.translate.goog/ru/articles.php?article_num=22951&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp (translated from Russian to English). Isicad was a offshoot of CAD software... Read more →

The Ancients Feared Eclipses; We Chuckle at Them

Opinion The ancients feared eclipses, or so we are told. We weren’t there to see for ourselves, so who knows. Me, I don’t really understand the obsession with people paying lots of money to see one as I find astronomical events slightly dull ever since we were promised the return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 would be super-spectacular and it ended up being an especially non-event event. Halley’s Comet in 1920; in 1986 it was invisible to those of us with naked eyes So, we instead turned to Twitter to entertain us with reactions to this week’s solar event starring... Read more →

Reliving WordPerfect v5.1's glory days, today

Opinion The peak of word processing occurred in late 1989 with the release of WordPefect v5.1. It already was the world's most popular writing tool, because of free telephone tech support and programmers who reacted positively to writers' wishlists. With v5.1, it gained drop-down menus; until then, we memorized something like 40 function key combinations to carry out commands like boldface and save. I recall it took me nearly half a year to become comfortable using a mouse with the menus. Here is what WordPerfect looked like after starting a new document: By default, WordPerfect v5.1 kept its new menu... Read more →

Why do we despise Zoom?

Opinion I recall, back in the 1960s, seeing AT&T's new videophone being demonstrated at a World's Fair (see figure at left). We were assured that this technology would invade our homes quickly. Even today, marketing tells us that one new tech or another will be part of our lives very soon. A 3D printer in every child's bedroom, anyone? The videophone didn't catch on, because the infrastructure couldn't support it. And because it was expensive (about $5,000 in today's dollars). And because people didn't want to have to get all dolled up before letting strangers -- strangers! -- look inside... Read more →

Working with a 16-year-old computer

Opinion Ford's Sync brochure boasting the latest in modern gadgetry -- from 2008 Sixteen-year-old computers might seem old, but not really: I bought my desktop in 2010, and it's still purring along. Tech doesn't have to be self-obsoleting, and the tech industry needs to understand that it's now as mature as the automotive industry. The 16-year-old computer I'm taking about is, in fact, a car. Or rather, in a car. Last week, I bought my latest car, a 2009 Ford Escape hybrid -- in the very rare color ice blue metallic --, which was built in the summer of 2008.... Read more →

How I record LP records to my computer

Opinion As a teenager, recording LP (long-play) records onto cassette tape for my portable player was definitely a lo-fi experience. To record, I set up a microphone in front of the our family's record player/radio console (and its lone speaker). Sometimes, house sounds were also recorded. Lo-fi was fine, because my portable cassette player was no different -- and I was desperate to hear music. Where I lived in Northern Canada, decent music was in short supply, whether on the sole radio station or the lone stereo store. Three decades later, technology advanced, and I recorded (almost) all my LPs... Read more →

Lessons Learned From “Whatever Happened To?”

Opinion For some CAD vendors, the tides of time wash away the plans for their future, no matter how well-executed. In 38 years of writing about computer-aided design, I’ve seen numerous companies disappear, perhaps through acquisitions, or else crushed by competitors, and even through pivots by the market. Some were the giants of their times, like Artist Graphics, the nVidia of the 1980s, who threw the biggest parties at CAD conferences (my favorite: the long desert-only tables served on the Queen Mary); today, the Internet has almost no record of the company from Minneapolis that invented the first proprietary graphics... Read more →

How I Typeset My Dad's Autobiography

Background A couple of decades ago, my dad wrote his autobiography. Well, a lot of it, the most interesting part of his life, from about age 6 to 31. He experienced growing up barefoot on a farm in rural East Prussia (then Germany, now Poland), working as a 14-year-old in the Heinkel Aircraft Factory, winning an all-paid scholarship to a university, only to be drafted into the German army the day before, spending most of his war years in training or in hospitals, being captured by the British on the French coast, staying in Scottish prisoner-of-war camps until 1948, arriving... Read more →

What Happens When You Get That Letter from Autodesk

EULA on the attack When it launched AutoCAD, Autodesk was lauded for the cheap price ($1,000), the ability to run on many different kinds of personal computers, and being customizable -- rare at a time when traditional CAD software could cost $100,000 a seat, ran on proprietary hardware, and could not be customized by users. Also, making copies of it was easy. So with version 2.5 in 1986, Autodesk began its decades-long (and unsuccessful) crackdown on copying by initially adding a hardware lock. The lockdown was a near-instant disaster, as (1) the hardware made it difficult to print drawings (due... Read more →

Achieving my three goals

Three out of three In my late teens or early 20s, I came up with three goals, as I looked ahead to my life post-university. Maybe it was because goals and such were trendy at the time, but after some reflection it came to me that my three goals were Become a millionaire (a.k.a. be independently wealthy) Own my own radio station Be the world's best-known transportation engineer Disparate yes, but reflecting my state in the late 1970s. At the time, I aimed to become a transportation engineer, and so was working my way through engineering at the University of... Read more →

Fixed: Denon Tonearm's Failure to Lift

Mechanical error When I finally bought a turntable, it was September 1980 and it was last stereo component I bought while still a university student. I decided on Denon's direct-drive semi-automatic DP-30L model, which cost me $400 -- about $1,000 in today's inflated dollars. Forty years later, this model today sells for $200-$300 on eBay. Names of parts and functions from the original owner's manual For the model name, I am guessing that 'D' is short for direct-drive, 'P' for phonograph, and 'L' for lifter. Direct-drive means that the motor is attached directly to the spindle. The controversy at the... Read more →

I never bought the ZX81

$99 proved too expensive Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX81, the second generation of the earliest affordable home computer -- and a distance cousin of our smartphones. The computer I never bought (image credit oldcomputer.info) Inventor Clive Sinclair specialized in small devices. I recall picking up a brochure of his diminutive calculator while in England in 1974. He also designed a tiny, unsuccessful automobile. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I watched the personal computer scene with its confusing array of standards -- S-100, CP/M -- making me hesitant to take the plunge. Part of the... Read more →

Worst hardware design ever

Oopsie hardware design While I was technical editor of CADalyst (1985-1991), I reviewed an awful lot of hardware -- graphics boards, monitors, display-list software, pen and electrostatic plotters, dot-matrix plotters, laser printers, hardware and software plot cachers, hardware and software scanners -- because at the time CADalyst was at first the only game in town. Those were remarkable years, in that I could have hands-on experience with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment related to CAD. (The most expensive was a $70,000 E-size super-fast Vidar scanner, that in today's dollars would be closer to $200,000.) I developed testing methodologies... Read more →

Updated: How to make Eudora 7 work with Gmail servers

Thanks to Hermes Eudora is an old email client. Last updated in 2006, it does not do well on Windows 8/10. It is software that I have been using on my desktop computers since December, 1994, when I first got onto the Internet (from CompuServe). My 96-year-old dad uses it. Today many, who tend to get their email through a Web browser and with free clients like GMail and Outlook, see it as a dinosaur. Eudora's Unique Functions Except that Eudora does things no modern email client does, and I have tried a dozen alternatives over the years. Here are... Read more →

Pay people to attend online Webinars

It's happening CAD conferences have done the pivot thing several times in the course of the history of our favorite software. In those early days, there were general CAD conferences, like AEC Systems, where lots of CAD vendors showed up and tens of thousands of users thronged the aisles. Those were delicious times. The problem for CAD vendors was that in such an environment customers could see, hear, touch, and learn about competitors. The stories of the Autodesk booth being mobbed in the mid-1980s are legend -- and true, for I was there. Competitors scowled at the sight that meant... Read more →

Who Had the First DWG Editor?

Felix CAD on first I always thought Softsource's VDraft was the first CAD program to use DWG as its native file format, but it looks like Graebert beat it with Felix CAD by about a half-year or year. Digging through the historical record, it appears that Felix CAD was first (1995) and VDraft second (1996). Both were developed independently from Autodesk and from each other. Felix CAD in Germany, after Autodesk took away the European AutoCAD distributorship from Graebert, and VDraft in the USA based on a DWG/DXF plug-in it had written earlier for Web browsers. I ended up writing... Read more →

From Cassette to MP3

Limitations galore For my daughter's upcoming major birthday, her husband wanted to make a playlist of the music she used in her figure skating routines. It was my job to hunt them down. One song was on a CD, so that was easy to convert to MP3. There is lots of free software that does that, even iTunes will do it once you jump through the correct hurdles. Another song was on a cassette tape. There was a time when I had hundreds of tapes, which I listened to, to spare wear and tear on the roughly 400 vinyl records... Read more →

Firing up my iPod Touch, ten years later

Model MC011C As the Palm Pilot era was beginning to wane, I began to look for a replacement. I had bought my first Palm Pilot, the original, in 1996, and then bought nearly every successive generation after I found it to be the most productive tool for me -- ever. Its simplicity meant it was efficient, and I demand efficiency. The iPad Touch from Apple was enticing, and so in early 2010 I bought one of the third-gen models. I knew from experience that it was best to buy a device with the most available storage RAM, and so I... Read more →

My First Software Manual -- 1981

Job Control Language Cleaning out my cupboards last week, I came across something unexpected. Software documentation that apparently I wrote in 1981. I have no recollection of it, nor do I know why I wrote it. All I recognized was the name of the co-author, Linda, a classmate of mine during that, the last of my seven years at the University of British Columbia. The document is historical not only for it being the first software documentation I ever wrote, but also in how it was produced. 1976 My first direct experience with computers was UBC's mainframe, an Amdahl that... Read more →

RetroCAD is Hip

The DOS-based reawakening Hipsters like old stuff, grungy stuff. Wrecked boards, worn out mugs. Best present I ever got for one of my daughters, according to her, was bringing back a slightly-damaged-looking camping mug from New Zealand. A present to end all presents. No doubt there is somewhere in China a factory with people whose job it is to make brand-new mugs look banged-up. Or maybe the look is part of the mould. Never mind. Retro is hip, even in CAD. We have people restarting computers from the 1980s and 1990s running CAD software from those days. If you grok... Read more →

Today we are talking about the same computer stuff as in 1985

Byte, June, 1985 A friend was moving and was throwing out stuff, when he came across his collection of Byte magazines from the early- to mid-1980s. Back then, Byte was the premier computer magazine, nerdy, and thick with ads -- until it was eclipsed by PC Magazine, which for a while was so popular that it came out twice a month, running over 1,000 pages each issue. Ah, those were the days. I read Byte in those days as well, although never a subscription, just buying it from time to time from the newsstand. One of its ads and product... Read more →

How Social Engineering (and acad.fas) Steals IP from AutoCAD

Social engineering What with all the news about China looking to snare Western technology (and Westerners snaring Chinese), we are now learning more about efforts to steal intellectual property from design firms. A reader writes, I guess you already have seen this, but just in case: https://www.forcepoint.com/blog/security-labs/autocad-malware-computer-aided-theft I have been warning about AutoCAD malware since the introduction of VBA routines in DWG, which include the auto-open function. Targeting acad.lsp (and the like) was possible even longer before, but always required social engineering, as it still does today. - D. R. Unauthorized access to AutoCAD and the IP it holds should... Read more →

Revit Co-founder Corrects Revit's History

Fresh code The CAD industry is incestuous, with people wandering from firm to firm, starting new ones, joining old ones. The software itself tends to work and look the same, no matter the source -- with a few exceptions. Even without knowing the inside story, it is possible to speculate over the lines of heritage. Sometimes we get it wrong. One factoid concerns the source of Revit, which seemingly came out of nowhere, helped by $50+ million in funding, and whose founders came from PTC -- a firm solidly based in MCAD, not AEC. (A factoid is speculation reported often... Read more →

My new camera is 40 years old

Minolta XE-7 The only SLR I ever bought was a Minolta XE-7 film camera. This is the story of why it is the only SLR I ever bought. I caught the photography bug in my teens, and lugged around my dad's Zeiss Ikon Contaflex II SLR (built in 1954 or later) around town, through vacations, and on band trips. It reeked of precise German engineering in its stiff controls, black leather wrap and dull chrome look. Zeiss Ikon Contraflex II is distinguished from other models in the line by its f2.8 45mm unremoveable lens and supplemental light meter But then... Read more →

My new tablet became obsolete 4 years ago

Blackberry Playbook Some people, like me, date the start of Blackberry's downfall to the failure of its Playbook tablet. For starters, the name was dumb.Anyhow... I have a thing for history (check out the several hundred software packages I have in my collection), and last week decided to acquire the fabled Playbook. On eBay, you can get ones in perfect condition for $50. Mine arrived after a week in the Canadian postal system. It was the 16GB model; they are also available in 32GB and 64GB capacities. It came with the fast charger that doesn't seem to charge particularly fast,... Read more →

Got AXD Files? We Got Actrix 2000 for translation!

Visio Killer arises from beyond the grave Remember when Autodesk was going to shut down Visio by releasing its very own diagramming software, Actrix Technical? It felt threatened by Visio's release of IntelliCAD 98 at 1/10th the price of AutoCAD. While Visio went on to become a billion-dollar acquisition by Microsoft and IntelliCAD spawned dozens of software companies around the world, Actrix bit the dust after just two releases. Every so often, someone contacts me, saying they have AXD files and needed to access the data locked inside of them. (See figure above.) Autodesk never provided a stand-alone translator for... Read more →

foto of the rememberance day: allied cemetery in germany

November 11 Graves of Canadian and other allied soldiers buried in Becklingen War Cemetery (south of Hamburg) during the final months of WWII Read more →

Ralph Grabowski celebrates 30 years of reporting on CAD

Since Mid-September, 1985 This week marks my 30th year in the CAD writing business. Thirty years ago, the CADalyst founder, owner, editor, and publisher hired me on as the brand-new technical writer/editor. I was the first full-time employee. In those days, CADalyst magazine was concerned only with AutoCAD. The new version at the time was v2.17f, which offered the ground-breaking "Expressions and Variables" feature. The first issue I worked on featured the first use of color in the magazine, with the cover story by Bill Kramer on how to use expressions and variables in AutoCAD -- later to be known... Read more →

Geriatric Computing

Segment failure I help out elderly people with their computers. The widow across the street, the mother-in-law, the aging father, and so on.They like computers for staying in touch -- through email or Facebook -- and for puttering around. My dad scans stuff into Word and then emails the .doc file to me. That's how he figured it out to work for him. My mother-in-law plays card games on her laptop. Some of them read about world events through the Web browser and check their bank balance. That's about as far as computing goes for them. What puzzled them is... Read more →

Lawyer tells inside story how Visio got IntelliCAD from Softdesk

Boomerang-ing It's been 18 years since a little something now known as IntelliCAD got it start, and in that time various people involved have told me bits and pieces of the story: How Visio ended up with IntelliCAD. From May 19, 1997 issue of Broeck Bulletin, we have a "Team B&T Success Story" published by the legal firm Brobeck Phleger & Harrison. Their story begins like this: The Boomerang personnel engaged in an off-site skunk works project in a San Diego suburb, under the protection of Softdesk's CEO, to develop a CAD engine (with which application software designed for AutoCAD... Read more →

Three terrific CAD packages that rocked the industry but made few sales

Footnotes that changed the direction of CAD A comment from a reader made me think about the CAD packages that had a big impact on our industry, but never did much in the way of sales. Here are the three most influential. 1. TriSpectives from 3D/eye (1995) 3D/eye introduced drag and drop modeling, the TriBall interactive 3D cursor, and real-time rendering while modeling. TriSpectives failed to sell enough, even at $500, and so was split in two, with Autodesk buying some technology and the remainder eventually owned by CAXA of China and today sold under the name of IronCAD. Portions... Read more →

AutoCAD Designer

AutoCAD's first 3D parametric modeller As I researched for an article that will appear in the January 12, 2015 issue of upFront.eZine, I was racking my brain about an Autodesk MCAD product called "Designer." I knew it existed briefly, but could not find any references to it on the Google. I asked editor friends for help, and some of them thought it might be connected to Autodesk's acquisition of Woodbourne, whose most famous employee was "Buzz" Kross, today the head of Autodesk's MCAD division. (Woodbourne was located in Lake Oswego, Oregon, explaining why Autodesk's MCAD division is still headquartered in... Read more →

174 Reasons to Upgrade to AutoCAD Release 12

Blast from the Past It was 1992 when Autodesk shipped AutoCAD Release 12. This was one of those favorite releases among users, like AutoCAD 2.5 before it and Release 14 after it. It represented the end of an era, the last version available in all major operating systems: Unix, DOS, Mac OS, and Windows. It was also the end of the era of massive printed documentation sets. For Release 12, Autodesk produced enough manuals to fill a foot of shelf space. Above is a photo from dave_in_delaware posted to CAD Tutor. (I have the complete set, but found it easier... Read more →

David Stein interviews Ralph Grabowski

David Stein: As many CAD news outlets as there are today, you have still remained in the top of everyone's list, as far as I can tell. What do you feel is the biggest challenge you face when preparing each newsletter? Ralph Grabowski: Usually none, except when I have no main feature for the next issue of upFront.eZine. In this case, I will generate a story out of nothing, by thinking about some aspect of CAD that irritates or interests me, and then banging away at the keyboard. I dislike the press release section, "Out of the Inbox," where I... Read more →

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... Read more →

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 Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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

Bookmark this! Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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. Read more →

CAD Insider: Autodesk Takes Local User Group Off Life Support

by Rooponder Tara, Tenlinks.com Autodesk's headquarters are in San Rafael, CA, about 20 miles north of the Golden Gate bridge. San Rafael (pronounced san raFELL, not san RAFFYel) is in beautiful Marin County (pronounced maRIN not MARin). Its easy to fall in love with the place. During my first visit 15 years ago, I looked out from the Autodesk lobby to see deer grazing on the foggy hillside. There may be a housing development there now but for the most part Marin exists as a wonderfully bucolic area. A small amount of development is permitted, mostly along the US101 corridor... Read more →

Getting busses out of the way of cars

One of the many problems with public transportation is that it gets in the way of private vehicles, the ones whose taxes pay for the roads and subsidize the buses, street cars, and trams. They inhibit efficient travel by our cars, because they (a) block the curb lane at stops; (b) are slow to accelerate from stops, and (c) take up the equivalent of 2-4 car lengths, thereby decreasing throughput volume per lane. (When bus drivers go on strike in Vancouver, car drivers celebrate, for the commute becomes much smoother.) Some cities "solve" the problem by creating exclusive transit lanes.... Read more →

foto of the sunday: for dog lovers only

Taken in Washington DC, June 2000. Read more →

foto of the sunday: the rather red corner store

A corner store in Washington DC, taken in June 2000. It boasts two public telephones, two air conditioners, two Coke machines, and two garbage containers. Read more →