In 1997 I was an Autodesk customer working at Oregon Iron Works here in the Portland Oregon area. I gave an interview as an AutoCAD R14 early pre-release alpha tester on how much better AutoCAD R14 was than the previous AutoCAD R13 release. Rohit Arora found the AutoCAD…

I am in the process of updating my AutoCAD History page after we just released the new AutoCAD 2017 Monday March 21, 2016. AutoCAD 2017 was codenamed Nautilus in alpha and beta testing prior to being officially released publicly. Update: My good friend Vladimir Michl of http://www.cadforum.cz spotted…

AutoCAD 2.6 included a sample drawing of a nozzle that has been one of the iconic sample drawings in AutoCAD release history. While it may seem trivial today to draw this, back in the early 1980’s it was really challenging for the creator of the drawing Don Strimbu…

This 5.25” floppy represents the very early days of AutoCAD where the introduction of the 2 year old AutoCAD version 2 was being exhibited at the FALL COMDEX 1984. AutoCAD 86 was first shown publicly at COMDEX 1982. It is amazing how far technology and Autodesk has come…

You may have seen a 5.25” floppy in the 1980’s, but what about a 8” floppy? Back in 1984 AutoCAD-86 version 2.40 was released for the NEC platform on 8” floppy disks. Increasingly these days most under the age of 30 have never seen a floppy disk and…

Recently my Irish friend living in Australia Sean Twomey asked me how I managed to get AutoCAD 2.18 to run on modern hardware. I told him all you needed was to create a virtual machine and then create a virtual disk smaller than 10Mb because in 1985 apparently…