That nice Sony company

I had a DOS legit copy of Generic CADD which was a really good program, but since I am a Windoze Weenie, I lost it somewhere along the way. Did it ever get a Windoze interface, and are copies of it for sale anywhere if it did?

Yeah, Protel bought Circuitmaker/Traxmaker and did the same kill job on a couple of hundred dollar software that beat the pants off of their other crap.

Jim

I was taking my daily walk thru the park and found a busted up CD-R on the ground, was suprised to find the recording film on it missing on a big area of it, it was like really really thin paint that was painted on something with no adherance whatsoever. I never really examined them but am used to regular cds that have the media embeded within the plastic. Yes theis CD-R was laying in the dirt and in the sun and all that but still to see it easily flaking off enmasse like that doesn't make them look super-long term reliable to me.

Sign the original, take a picture (digital camera), store on CD with the copy. Should anyone ever choose to inquire, you have the evidence of a legal copy.

BTW, I still use Generic CADD which I first got as LogiCADD bundled with a Logitech mouse. Updates it over the years to the last version (6.11). Autodesk bought and killed it - couldn't tollerate 90% of the function at 10% of the cost of their bloatware. Have yet to find anything better for 2D drawings.

Ted

I don't use Word, Excel, etc so I don't have their bloated files but I have been using APL (now using APL2 for OS/2) since 1967. My workspaces have followed me through IBM 7-track tape to 9-track to 8"floppies to

5-1/4"floppies to 3-1/2" floppies to CD and now DVD. All of my stuff (which has been updated and expanded in function if not much in size) plus the APL system and all its auxilliary processors, etc. is on my hard drive in 3,147,936,620 bytes. The Excel .EXE file alone is over 7MB. Talk about bloat!

Ted

Hello Ted,

Then someone could still says I sold it after taking the picture. But I guess not in this case with such an old and pretty simple program. Don't know if signing would cut it. Maybe.

Logitech had rather nifty stuff packaged with their mice and hand scanners. The best was a DOS multi tasker that I used for a very long time. Didn't need no Windows to work on schematics and write the module spec in parallel. Much faster than today's 'modern' environments and the laptop would go for 5-6 hours on one NiCd battery.

I bought TurboCAD in the early 90's. IIRC it was about $40 at one of the nerd stores near Seattle. You have a point with your view of what happens after an acquisition. Look at OrCad schematic capture. My first license cost $499. Now it is well over $1500. So, they lost a customer (me).

Regards, Joerg

Sony is having problems again with their new laptops.

CDR's don't last very long. The glue likely lasted longer than the CDR will.

Hello Mike,

These guys say they do:

They state over 50 years for a CD-R and over 20 years for a CD-RW after recording. The latter surprised me, I thought it was much less. The real surprise is the statement that the shelf life of unrecorded disks for both versions is only 5-10 years.

So far the only problems I had was with music CD. They were all bought in music stores so I was expecting higher quality there. In the summer I had several of them delaminate. Others quit playing right and upon examination part of the disks had turned blueish. This never happened to any of my data CD.

Regards, Joerg

Certainly there's a lot of FUD involved in archiving and data longevity. It seems to suit all sides to believe that recording media is impermanent. Some make money; others sleep better at night for having spent it, and thereby making it someone else's problem. There's a lot of discussion in the photo groups regarding archival quality of some materials, chief among them CDR and DVD-/+. I'm likely doing a disservice by passing on what I know only, at best, secondhand. It's enough to know that CDRs have finite lifetimes, and are not good media for long-term archiving.

The osta.org folks at the link you posted say only that the manufacturers used to claim those numbers, but that "manufacturing methods and materials change over time as do application and cost imperatives". They also say these numbers only take into account heat and humidity cycles. A reasonable person should also know that the coatings are also sensitive to UV and atmospheric contaminants. My guess is that their useful lifetime is much less, but it's just that: my guess.

I love Generic CADD and still use it on a Win ME machine. The only problems I've had are the right mouse button is now the wheel click, and the lines on the printer are too thin. That's because I'm using the HP III interface and driving a HP 6L printer. The minimum line resolution on the old printer was 300 dots per inch and the HP 6L is 600 dots per inch.

The last version issued had a way to save your drawings in a different format that was readable by their newer low end CAD program. I never had a chance to actually try it out but feel it would work.

snipped-for-privacy@squires.com

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I use Taiyo Yuden CD-R's exclusively. They supposedly have the best record for stability.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I seem to recall an article saying it was based on the type of DYE used.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Hello Jim,

I use Verbatim. Haven't lost one in a decade or so, before that I didn't use CD-R. But the million Dollar question about longevity is as always: How do they really know?

Regards, Joerg

Try VisualCADD for Windows, basically Generic CADD's successor:

The original Generic people started Numera Software when their non compete with Autodesk expired, and developed VisualCADD, but they had marketing problems, and sold it to Corel, who didn't know what to do with it, who in turn sold it to IMSI, who also didn't have a clue what to do with it, and eventually Tritools Partners bought it from IMSI a few years ago, and they have been looking after it quite nicely, V5.0 was just released a few months ago.

You'll probably qualify for an upgrade from Generic CADD.

Lukas

That's a non-starter since I don't use windoze.

Ted