Our Readers Write Well
Opinions by Ralph Grabowski and readers
Thanks to readers who donate to WorldCAD Access. It encourages me!
Al Hibma
Re: Four Alternative MCAD Programs
“Thanks for the article mention. While some of the content on IronCAD is correct, there are some incorrect items. The main product is IronCAD, not the IronCAD Inovate as listed.
IronCAD is the full-featured product that includes all capabilities in 3D along with 2D detailing and the integrated mechanical draft environment.
Inovate is our Collaboration tool that is only 3D and has limited functionality (no sheet metal creation, no external links, and limited Intellishape options).
IronCAD has both perpetual licensing and term/subscription licensing available.
In terms of the modeling, yes, we have the Drag & Drop catalogs, but it also has your normal sketch-to-3D-feature creation capabilities. The catalogs provide users to use predefined shapes to quickly build and allows users to store features, parts, assemblies, materials, etc in the catalog for reuse.
IronCAD uses a Structured and Innovative design approach.
Structured design is similar to standard MCAD with datum planes/point/axis, sketch, and relations in a history-bound order when you need that level of control.
Innovative design uses the feature history but is not bound by that history. Users can make flexible changes along the way, and predictable changes can be made by the system.
We default to Innovative design when you use IronCAD but users can enable Structure parts and mix both together in the single scene environment
- Cary O’Connor
The editor replies: “Sorry for getting the names of the products wrong. The primary purpose of the article was to highlight differences between four CAD programs, and I was limited by the editor of Design Engineering magazine to 1,400 words, so there wasn’t room for lots more details.
As for pricing, the IronCAD site doesn’t seem to list any, but I did find pricing at an IronCAD reseller, where I could only find permanent license prices.”
“Alibre’s permanent transferable licenses are a big deal in this subscription-heavy market.
FreeCAD’s workbench system took me a while to get used to, but having both MCAD and BIM functionality for free is pretty remarkable.”
- Neural Foundry
“RS DesignSpark mechanical deserves mention here. Top-shelf geometry kernel and super easy to use. Paid version is super cheap at <$15/mo.”
- Eric Schleicher
The editor replies: “DesignSpark is the former SpaceClaim Engineer. It has a free version, along with monthly subscription levels for more functions.
There are many more MCAD programs I could have written about, but didn’t for space reasons. In fact, along the way, I dropped and replaced two: The install for one was too buggy; with the other, the CAD vendor responded too late to me.”
Re: The Highs and Lows of PC CAD History
“You did a great job Ralph showing the cost of things then in today’s $$$, except the cost for Intergraph seat. The $100,000/seat was what we paid for in 1984, today would cost $312,000/seat. We bought six seats of Intergraph dual Interact screens CAD workstations, and then tied them to a VAX VMS mainframe.
Regarding AutoCAD’s dominance, I think what truly allowed them to be #1 without being the best was their ability to allow their software to be pirated. No dongle needed to assure an actual seat was paid allowed them to achieve market dominance by brute numbers.
In 1991 I left the firm that had the expensive Intergraph CAD, to a medical device firm where we had Pro/Engineer on a SGI, and VersaCAD, Anvil 1000, CADKEY and Personal Designer on PCs. They all smoked AutoCAD back then, I felt. It wasn’t until AutoCAD 14 on Windows that we consolidated every 2D drawing to that.”
- Randy Mees
The editor replies: “That $100,000/seat number has been thrown about (by me and others) so often it became a cliche -- one that I forgot to upscale through inflation, as you rightly note.
The key difference between Intergraph and AutoCAD was that Intergraph charged customers to customize the software, whereas AutoCAD users could do it themselves.”
“Nice jaunt down memory lane. I was there for most of this. The biggest issue I’ve always seen is the lack of industry-standard files. This allowed one company to control almost everything.
The music industry was the first, as I recall, to buck this trend with the MIDI protocol. We then had standards like MP3 and Unicode, and we know they have affected their industries. We are now seeing more of these standards in the gaming and CGI industries.
BIM was supposed to be the ultimate in design collaboration. How was that supposed to happen without standards file format?”
- Dave Edwards
The editor replies: You make a good point about MIDI being the universal file format for electronic music instruments, albeit it is a very simple format -- a data transfer format, really. I played around with Cakewalk, MIDI, a Yamaha synth in the late 1980s, but found I had no natural talent for making music.
By contrast, BIM (which emerged from the IFC data transfer format), is horrendously complex, with the properties of every screw in every door frame in every wall on every floor to be accounted for, depending on the LoD (level of detail).”
“I can’t go as back as the Altair, but my first pen plotter is on the picture in your article. I bought it second-hand. I also had a Palm Pilot.
About Windows and multitasking: I could try out AutoCAD on OS/2 and I was so impressed that I bought OS/2 and installed it on a computer; I only used it to run AutoCAD and to plot.
In the mid-90s, a coworker made his living switching companies from Pro/Engineer on workstations, mainly HP, to Windows computers. The cost of each Windows seat (including graphics board, 20” monitor, 32MB RAM) was around 25% less than the workstation. I don’t remember the numbers on Pro/Engineer but I remember paying $110 in the 90s for code to use an HP LaserJet 4 driver. The software itself was cheaper to run on PCs.”
- Julián
The editor replies: “I’m impressed. You must be the only person I know who actually used OS/2!
My OS/2 story: While I was technical editor at CADalyst magazine, IBM came out with the PS/2, and we got a loaner machine. We couldn’t start it, because it was password-protected. We couldn’t change the password in the programmable BIOS, because the case was locked. We couldn’t open the case, because the key had been lost by the previous reviewer.”
“It was so interesting to see during my career the adoption of CAD by mainstream corporations as the cost dropped. Prior to gaming, the CAD workstations taxed the limits of PCs and their graphics cards, and often required the most powerful PCs a company had.
Within a span of about 11 years, my CAD workstations went from $100,000/seat (1984 Intergraph Dual Screen Interact, for 2D and wireframe 3D) to $70,000/seat (1991 Pro/Engineer 3D solid modeling on a Silicon Graphics 4D35 Unix workstation) to $20,000/seat (1995 Pro/Engineer with HP computer running Windows NT). All $$ in those times dollars.
Just an amazing time to be alive and in business to see the intersection of more powerful computers with the CAD transition from 2D to 3D, and how they all married up.”
- Randy Mees on LinkedIn
Re: Asking AI Useful Questions
“I wonder how they plan to address the future of AI content learning. Currently, it is using what’s publicly available, which is primarily human-created content. I see more and more articles and content created by AI, often with small errors and content that sometimes makes little sense.
Once AI begins to reference AI content, the errors compound in what I call Maximum AI Entropy. We’ll have perfect grammatically correct content that is complete gibberish.”
- Jason Work
The editor replies: “This is the problem of LLM-based AI, which is the type of AI that gets the most attention right now. Its developers assume just by digesting all (written and visual) human knowledge, that brilliant answers will be forthcoming.
As you note, the input is stale-dated and even consist of bad outputs from other AI systems, which, on average, is 30% wrong. This is the snake eating its tail. I don’t think that AI content learning has a future.”
“My very strong suggestion is to take a few online classes in AI, such as those offered by Coursera, or your local community college.
One more truth to keep in mind: AI is not monolithic. It is a dozen major companies competing for market share and tech dominance, but that means that no single AI platform will ever rule the world. This is good, because one AI/LLM can always be employed to check the work of another AI/LLM, which is currently a popular method to check AI-generated code.
AI is inevitable, so it would be best if you learn as much as you can. Also, since AI is inevitable, you can take advantage of that fact in your stock portfolio: buy tech stocks!”
- Peter Lawton
The editor replies: “LLM-based AI is somewhat monolithic, as they (legally and illegally) soak up information from the same sets of Web sites, books, and newspapers. The OpenAI corporation is positioning itself to rule the world.
The LLM-based AI bubble will pop later this year from excessive debt and flat-lining improvements.”
The guy who wrote FastCAD "wrote" the first AutoCAD. Mike Riddle contributed his code to the newly-formed Autodesk. According to the legend, the early versions of AutoCAD even included true 3D but it was not exposed. Later, Riddle sued Autodesk for not compensating him properly, and won the case.
Talk about memory lane. I was quite surprised to see your newsletter popup in my email. I purchased a few dozen of your books back in the day. I don't recall seeing anything from you in years. I've been meaning to reply, but kept putting it off. In your last article I noticed someone mentioned OS/2, so I simply had to say something. I ran an international Bulletin Board System back in the mid 70's dialup days dedicated to AutoCAD. It was pretty popular at the time. I ran OS/2 and a Frontend mailer to run and process the mail packets from all the nodes in the network. I really enjoyed those days and the challenges of running a BBS, but not the cost. I also recall how difficult it was encouraging local Architects and Engineering firms to jump on board with the new technology, meaning sharing information on a BBS. I thought that was so odd considering how involved I was in that community. I still have my OS/2 installation disc too, but I'm not sure why. Just like my AutoCAD 1.4 (if I recall) manual. On another note, I thought FastCAD was going to give AutoDesk a run for its money at one point in time, but it petered out. It had a lot of features that were well ahead of AutoCAD, and since it was written in ASM, it was fast. Great to see you back Ralph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23LLwWk3rjA&t=3s
-JW: