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Originally Posted by Tim Baird
I learned on AutoCad R13 in high school and I have copies as far back as R6.
Now that's old school.
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The first CAD system I got to play with was CADAM way back in 1981. Some input was typed but mostly you used a "button box" and a "light pen". The button box was an auxillary box with about 40 buttons on it for different functions. Usually you put it on the left side of the CRT. The light pen was a precursor to the mouse. You used it to select items on the screen. Most people used their right hand for this. A really good user kept their eyes on the screen and used these two additions almost exclusively. And yes there was a small segment of the population with "left handed" CAD tubes. Every once in a while I'd log onto one by mistake ...
Because I was good at CADAM, I got trained on NCAD. NCAD was Northrop's (this was before the (Northrop-Grumman merger) in-house 3D CAD system. It used the same hardware as CADAM and was a true 3D system with NURBS surfacing. (CADAM was 2D and would auto-generate views in other dimensions, if you asked it nicely) NCAD terminals also had a "dial box" with 8 dials for moving geometry. Northrop couldn't find a program to meet their requirements so they wrote their own. No wonder the B-2 was so expensive to develop. I think we still maintain a few seats of NCAD for B-2 upgrades etc. at least we did the last time I was authorized to know such things, but that was years ago.
The interesting thing about NCAD was the user interface was driven entirely by Engineering, so it was very easy to do all sorts of things that take many steps in modern CAD systems. Sometimes I still reach for the old button box but rotating with a mouse is easier than the dial box.
Before that I was a summer intern at Rockwell on the B-1 program. Everything was done on pencil and paper and real drawings were kept in a real vault. You had to check them out and back in to work on them. They must have liked my work, the last few days they let me work in INK.
ChrisH