My first job in 1986 I sat down at a drafting board with all my fresh new templates, protractors, ink pens , electric eraser, angles and rulers etc. I pulled out some fresh sheets of velum paper and drew some stuff for Disney. Then a few months into it my boss put a PC on my desk which amounted to a 186 processor with a 10mb hard drive and a souped up video card - 1 megabyte on board! a math co processor and a giant stack of AutoCAD ver. 2.6 5-1/4 floppy disks (still got em), a 3 color CGA monitor and a fancy new pen plotter. This was high tech to the max. Good ole DOS and the 3 finger salute (Cntrl alt Del.)
AutoCAD then actually wasn't all that different then than it is now to be honest. I Type everything still today and the original commands haven't changed. Just a lot of new bells and whistles. Compared to all the programs of their time AutoCAD was an amazing bargain. All the big companies had huge investments in the machines capable of running programs like Anvil and AutoTROL. Those machines started in the $20,000 range and also required maintenance contracts to keep em running. So your machine came with a technician.
Anyhow, version 10 was hot stuff and had the first inklings of 3D. Also 3D studio was born that year (I played with that too) I think in 1989ish. But version 13 was the first true 3D. I love AutoCAD, I've made a career with it, I've tweaked it every way to Sunday and back. It's been a great tool with little to be desired (for all general purposes) since the beginning.
Still got all those un-used board drafting tools stinking up my un-used briefcase.
