good free PCB software

I also started with Wordstar on CP/M. The delay was quite apparent on floppies, but disappeared when I upgraded to hard disks. Two Seagate ST412,

10 megabytes each. They held everything needed to run a small business - accounting, engineering, inventory, billing, customer correspondence, and plenty of room left over for growth.

Over two decades later, we now need 1 gig of ram, 2 gigs of hard disk space, and 1 GHz cpu just to install the operating system.

And the word processor still works as if you were using floppies:)

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:

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SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
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Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
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Reply to
Mike Monett
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Hi Mike,

I never had the luxury of hard disks with CP/M... first hard disk I encountered was on a PC, and also 10MB. (And the first non-PC I had with a hard drive was an Amiga, with an ST296N... 80MB... seemed limitless!)

Sure, but the price has dropped substantially... you can get a respectable PC for

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

Indeed. I haven't dug deep enough into it yet, but I'm hoping that the PCB tool has a feature to re-do refdeses based on board location, then back-annotate that to the schematic.

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

But Microsoft writes programs that *demand* more resources than the typical PC being sold at time of release. "Vista" is a very good example of this nasty behavior.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Thanks very much. I plan to add a lot of new stuff on Pierce and overtone oscillators, but haven't had much time lately. I'll post a note when I finally get around to doing it.

BTW, if you have a web site and find you are wasting a lot of time uploading files one by one, try Free FTP Manager:

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This was originally open source but was removed from the web. Then some company grabbed it and added a spyware program to the installation program.

You can just stop the installation of the spyware program and continue with Free FTP manager. The installation will complain but still allow you to do it. Then erase the spyware directory and you now have a free ftp sync program.

Works like a charm, especially on web sites that limit the number of users so you have to keep hammering until you finally connect.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:

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SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
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Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
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Reply to
Mike Monett

Exactly my point!

Reply to
Robert Baer

Lessee...an order of magnitude for the price decrease, but at least

*three* orders of magnitude for required resources. Seems the tradeoff is not so good...
Reply to
Robert Baer

Next you're going to be telling me there's no reason to drive a Humvee to the grocery store a mile away just to pick up eggs and milk when you could ride your bicycle there instead. :-)

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

Really? How do you figure? Let's talk about resources:

1) a 20G drive is now the size of a stack of 5 credit cards (remember the 20Mb Seagates?) 2) 1Gb of ram is now the size of a stick of chewing gum (remember how big a 64k x1 ram chip was?) 3) a $500 PC typically fits inside of the LCD monitor. (remember the IBM-PC/AT?)

The footprint on my desk for a modern PC is now tiny.

The power consumption of my current setup doesn't even register on the power meter of my UPS. My previous setup drew 200W just for the

19 inch monitor.

My previous 19 inch monitor hurt my eyes, but my new LCD has text that is equal to printed text in clarity.

My IBM-PC/AT cost $5000 with a 20Mb drive, and 128K of ram. The Princeton Graphics monitor I used with it cost $800. The 30Mb driver I replaced the unreliable 20Mb CMI drive with cost $800

Dare I talk of the price of the Laser Printer I used with this early machine ($2450)

Resources as you are measuring them mean nothing!

-Chuck

Reply to
Chuck Harris

Ah, interesting.

So I tried it, and the configure script for libgeda-200601020 bombed out looking for guile. For some reason, there's a hardcoded path for it. Here's the output from that configure, which is called from "make install" at the top of the geda directory tree:

libgeda-20061020/config.log:GUILE_LDFLAGS=' -lguile -lltdl

-L/home/janneke/vc/gub-dev/target/cygwin/system/usr/lib

-L/home/janneke/vc/gub-dev/target/cygwin/system/usr/bin

-L/home/janneke/vc/gub-dev/target/cygwin/system/usr/lib/w32api -lgmp

-lcrypt -lm -lltdl'

I know I'm not logged into cygwin as janneke ...

grepping through the entire gEDA tree for "janneke" turned it up only in libgeda-20061020/config.log.

Very odd.

(The tools built and run well on a Mac Book Pro and OS X.)

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

I still use Borland Sprint as my main editor. It was released in 1988, and was designed to run on a 4.77MHz 8088 with several hundred k of ram. It runs fine on modern cpu's.

The nice thing is it uses macros which you write yourself. I now have the world's fastest and most powerful editor. It can open 26 files simultaneously, and it autodetects all the different file types, such as html, Pascal, Assembly, C, plain ascii text, email, etc.

This means I can use the same function key to perform the same function, such as formatting a paragraph. For example, F4 formats this entire message in square justification. In Pascal and C, the same function key indents each line to identify blocks of code, like this:

begin GetFileName(true, cpos);

if (ErrorNum = 0) then begin case FileOption('Change Date on') of 'A' : Msv := AMBF; 'F' : Msv := FileStr; else exit; end;

if (Msv > '') then begin DosExec(TouchFDate, Msv); UpDateFiles; GetSpot; end; end; end;

The software automatically switches to the appropriate routine needed for that file type, so I don't have to have a dozen different editors, each with their own keystroke definitions.

This is a real problem when one editor uses one keystroke to accomplish a function, and another editor uses a different keystroke for the same function. You can never learn which keystroke to use for each editor. This makes editing extremely error-prone, and it can slow you down by an order of magnitude.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:

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SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
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Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
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Reply to
Mike Monett

Better yet....a 4 letter word.... w a l k .

Reply to
Robert Baer

Sigh! One cannot price nostalga!

Reply to
Robert Baer

Yup! there are a number of DOS-type programs that run circles around WinDoze crap.

Reply to
Robert Baer

On a sunny day (Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:17:35 -0500) it happened Mike Monett wrote in :

I like the software formatting, great. But I wonder why the variable spaces to nicely get the left border straight in the above text. Spaces are as apuse in spoken text, all these different pauses between words..

Personally I use 'joe' in Linux, it is great for programming, reminds a bit of wordstar. My last DOS editor was 'boxer' even have a license for it.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sat, 02 Dec 2006 07:00:00 GMT) it happened Robert Baer wrote in :

Sure, some have a PDP10 at home.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

I have a working PDP8/E in my shop... I probably ought to turn it on sometime, and see if it is still working, or if my memory of its working is just nostalgia.

I would sure like to find a nice Tektronix 4010 (or 4012), or ASR33 to go with the 8/E... Something about using a Pentium laptop with 20G HD to act as a terminal for a PDP8/E bothers me.

-Chuck

Reply to
Chuck Harris

On a sunny day (Sat, 02 Dec 2006 11:52:50 -0500) it happened Chuck Harris wrote in :

I have an old NEC cashier terminal with RS232 in the attic. All TTL, looks futuristic :-) But it is kaput, started fixing it, but no diagram, use the PC for terminal was easier. It was in an unheated space, died when it once was -20 C. No microprocessor that I could find, all true TTL!

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:04:56 GMT) it happened Jan Panteltje wrote in :

Actually it is a NCR, not NEC, just looked.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

snip

I do not know the answers to these questions myself. But there is a very active Kicad user group at yahoo which I moderate. I know many users have successfully imported Orcad libraries so if you join the group I am sure they will be able to tell you exactly what to do. The yahoo group is at:

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HTH

ian

Reply to
Ian Bell

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