good free PCB software

[Mike Monett]

I've used Wordstar on a CP/M machine and, yeah, it was quite
impressive for the time, but I distinctly remember that there were
plenty of 3-5 second pauses depending on what you were doing while the
program went and loaded an overlay, loaded the next section of your
file, etc. I think there have been significant productivity gains
with modern word processors like Word of OpenOffice Writer.

I also started with Wordstar on CP/M. The delay was quite apparent on
floppies, but disappeared when I upgraded to hard disks. Two Seagate ST412,
10 megabytes each. They held everything needed to run a small business -
accounting, engineering, inventory, billing, customer correspondence, and
plenty of room left over for growth.

Over two decades later, we now need 1 gig of ram, 2 gigs of hard disk
space, and 1 GHz cpu just to install the operating system.

And the word processor still works as if you were using floppies

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Hi Mike,

I also started with Wordstar on CP/M. The delay was quite apparent on
floppies, but disappeared when I upgraded to hard disks.

I never had the luxury of hard disks with CP/M... first hard disk I
encountered was on a PC, and also 10MB. (And the first non-PC I had with a
hard drive was an Amiga, with an ST296N... 80MB... seemed limitless!)

Over two decades later, we now need 1 gig of ram, 2 gigs of hard disk
space, and 1 GHz cpu just to install the operating system.

Sure, but the price has dropped substantially... you can get a respectable PC
for <$500, complete, these days!

BTW, nice web page you have on crystal oscillators and SPICE.

---Joel

 

[Andy Peters]

Thanks, Christian. This will become very interesting when back-annotation
is available.

Indeed. I haven't dug deep enough into it yet, but I'm hoping that the
PCB tool has a feature to re-do refdeses based on board location, then
back-annotate that to the schematic.

-a

 

[Robert Baer]

Robert,




I've used Wordstar on a CP/M machine and, yeah, it was quite impressive for
the time, but I distinctly remember that there were plenty of 3-5 second
pauses depending on what you were doing while the program went and loaded an
overlay, loaded the next section of your file, etc. I think there have been
significant productivity gains with modern word processors like Word of
OpenOffice Writer.




It's kinda a resource thing... gas is cheaper in the U.S. than in other
countries, so we drive bigger cars... memory is dirt cheap everywhere, so
people write bigger programs...

But Microsoft writes programs that *demand* more resources than the
typical PC being sold at time of release.
"Vista" is a very good example of this nasty behavior.

 

[Mike Monett]

Sure, but the price has dropped substantially. You can get a
respectable PC for <$500, complete, these days!

So true. I bought a bunch of IBM XT's when they came out. I think
they were something like $7,500 each. But that got rid of the
Selectrics.

Our biggest problem was when a secretary accidentally loaded
command.com into Wordstar, then followed our strict instructions to
save everything before exiting the program.

Command.com formatted in Wordstar doesn't work. They would burst
into tears thinking they were going to be fired for wrecking the
computer.

BTW, nice web page you have on crystal oscillators and SPICE.

Thanks very much. I plan to add a lot of new stuff on Pierce and
overtone oscillators, but haven't had much time lately. I'll post a
note when I finally get around to doing it.

BTW, if you have a web site and find you are wasting a lot of time
uploading files one by one, try Free FTP Manager:

http://www.download3000.com/download_10986.html

This was originally open source but was removed from the web. Then
some company grabbed it and added a spyware program to the
installation program.

You can just stop the installation of the spyware program and
continue with Free FTP manager. The installation will complain but
still allow you to do it. Then erase the spyware directory and you
now have a free ftp sync program.

Works like a charm, especially on web sites that limit the number of
users so you have to keep hammering until you finally connect.

---Joel

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm

 

[Robert Baer]

I also started with Wordstar on CP/M. The delay was quite apparent on
floppies, but disappeared when I upgraded to hard disks. Two Seagate ST412,
10 megabytes each. They held everything needed to run a small business -
accounting, engineering, inventory, billing, customer correspondence, and
plenty of room left over for growth.

Over two decades later, we now need 1 gig of ram, 2 gigs of hard disk
space, and 1 GHz cpu just to install the operating system.

And the word processor still works as if you were using floppies

Regards,

Mike Monett

Exactly my point!

 

[Robert Baer]

Hi Mike,




I never had the luxury of hard disks with CP/M... first hard disk I
encountered was on a PC, and also 10MB. (And the first non-PC I had with a
hard drive was an Amiga, with an ST296N... 80MB... seemed limitless!)




Sure, but the price has dropped substantially... you can get a respectable PC
for <$500, complete, these days!

BTW, nice web page you have on crystal oscillators and SPICE.

---Joel

Lessee...an order of magnitude for the price decrease, but at least
*three* orders of magnitude for required resources.
Seems the tradeoff is not so good...

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Lessee...an order of magnitude for the price decrease, but at least
*three* orders of magnitude for required resources.
Seems the tradeoff is not so good...

Next you're going to be telling me there's no reason to drive a Humvee to the
grocery store a mile away just to pick up eggs and milk when you could ride
your bicycle there instead.

 

[Chuck Harris]

Lessee...an order of magnitude for the price decrease, but at least
*three* orders of magnitude for required resources.
Seems the tradeoff is not so good...

Really? How do you figure? Let's talk about resources:

1) a 20G drive is now the size of a stack of 5 credit cards
(remember the 20Mb Seagates?)
2) 1Gb of ram is now the size of a stick of chewing gum
(remember how big a 64k x1 ram chip was?)
3) a $500 PC typically fits inside of the LCD monitor.
(remember the IBM-PC/AT?)

The footprint on my desk for a modern PC is now tiny.

The power consumption of my current setup doesn't even register on the
power meter of my UPS. My previous setup drew 200W just for the
19 inch monitor.

My previous 19 inch monitor hurt my eyes, but my new LCD has text that
is equal to printed text in clarity.

My IBM-PC/AT cost $5000 with a 20Mb drive, and 128K of ram.
The Princeton Graphics monitor I used with it cost $800. The 30Mb
driver I replaced the unreliable 20Mb CMI drive with cost $800

Dare I talk of the price of the Laser Printer I used with this early
machine ($2450)

Resources as you are measuring them mean nothing!

-Chuck

 

[Andy Peters]

ok I have found it!! you will find everything you need to install in
windows here:
http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:cygwin
have fun

Ah, interesting.

So I tried it, and the configure script for libgeda-200601020 bombed
out looking for guile. For some reason, there's a hardcoded path for
it. Here's the output from that configure, which is called from "make
install" at the top of the geda directory tree:

libgeda-20061020/config.log:GUILE_LDFLAGS=' -lguile -lltdl
-L/home/janneke/vc/gub-dev/target/cygwin/system/usr/lib
-L/home/janneke/vc/gub-dev/target/cygwin/system/usr/bin
-L/home/janneke/vc/gub-dev/target/cygwin/system/usr/lib/w32api -lgmp
-lcrypt -lm -lltdl'

I know I'm not logged into cygwin as janneke ...

grepping through the entire gEDA tree for "janneke" turned it up only
in libgeda-20061020/config.log.

Very odd.

(The tools built and run well on a Mac Book Pro and OS X.)

-a

 

[Mike Monett]

Lessee. An order of magnitude for the price decrease, but at least
*three* orders of magnitude for required resources.

Seems the tradeoff is not so good.

I still use Borland Sprint as my main editor. It was released in
1988, and was designed to run on a 4.77MHz 8088 with several hundred
k of ram. It runs fine on modern cpu's.

The nice thing is it uses macros which you write yourself. I now
have the world's fastest and most powerful editor. It can open 26
files simultaneously, and it autodetects all the different file
types, such as html, Pascal, Assembly, C, plain ascii text, email,
etc.

This means I can use the same function key to perform the same
function, such as formatting a paragraph. For example, F4 formats
this entire message in square justification. In Pascal and C, the
same function key indents each line to identify blocks of code, like
this:

begin
GetFileName(true, cpos);

if (ErrorNum = 0) then
begin
case FileOption('Change Date on') of
'A' : Msv := AMBF;
'F' : Msv := FileStr;
else
exit;
end;

if (Msv > '') then
begin
DosExec(TouchFDate, Msv);
UpDateFiles;
GetSpot;
end;
end;
end;

The software automatically switches to the appropriate routine
needed for that file type, so I don't have to have a dozen different
editors, each with their own keystroke definitions.

This is a real problem when one editor uses one keystroke to
accomplish a function, and another editor uses a different keystroke
for the same function. You can never learn which keystroke to use
for each editor. This makes editing extremely error-prone, and it
can slow you down by an order of magnitude.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm

 

[Robert Baer]

Next you're going to be telling me there's no reason to drive a Humvee to the
grocery store a mile away just to pick up eggs and milk when you could ride
your bicycle there instead.

Better yet....a 4 letter word.... w a l k .

 

[Robert Baer]

Really? How do you figure? Let's talk about resources:

1) a 20G drive is now the size of a stack of 5 credit cards
(remember the 20Mb Seagates?)
2) 1Gb of ram is now the size of a stick of chewing gum
(remember how big a 64k x1 ram chip was?)
3) a $500 PC typically fits inside of the LCD monitor.
(remember the IBM-PC/AT?)

The footprint on my desk for a modern PC is now tiny.

The power consumption of my current setup doesn't even register on the
power meter of my UPS. My previous setup drew 200W just for the
19 inch monitor.

My previous 19 inch monitor hurt my eyes, but my new LCD has text that
is equal to printed text in clarity.

My IBM-PC/AT cost $5000 with a 20Mb drive, and 128K of ram.
The Princeton Graphics monitor I used with it cost $800. The 30Mb
driver I replaced the unreliable 20Mb CMI drive with cost $800

Dare I talk of the price of the Laser Printer I used with this early
machine ($2450)

Resources as you are measuring them mean nothing!

-Chuck

Sigh! One cannot price nostalga!

 

[Robert Baer]

I still use Borland Sprint as my main editor. It was released in
1988, and was designed to run on a 4.77MHz 8088 with several hundred
k of ram. It runs fine on modern cpu's.

The nice thing is it uses macros which you write yourself. I now
have the world's fastest and most powerful editor. It can open 26
files simultaneously, and it autodetects all the different file
types, such as html, Pascal, Assembly, C, plain ascii text, email,
etc.

This means I can use the same function key to perform the same
function, such as formatting a paragraph. For example, F4 formats
this entire message in square justification. In Pascal and C, the
same function key indents each line to identify blocks of code, like
this:

begin
GetFileName(true, cpos);

if (ErrorNum = 0) then
begin
case FileOption('Change Date on') of
'A' : Msv := AMBF;
'F' : Msv := FileStr;
else
exit;
end;

if (Msv > '') then
begin
DosExec(TouchFDate, Msv);
UpDateFiles;
GetSpot;
end;
end;
end;

The software automatically switches to the appropriate routine
needed for that file type, so I don't have to have a dozen different
editors, each with their own keystroke definitions.

This is a real problem when one editor uses one keystroke to
accomplish a function, and another editor uses a different keystroke
for the same function. You can never learn which keystroke to use
for each editor. This makes editing extremely error-prone, and it
can slow you down by an order of magnitude.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm

Yup! there are a number of DOS-type programs that run circles around
WinDoze crap.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

The software automatically switches to the appropriate routine
needed for that file type, so I don't have to have a dozen different
editors, each with their own keystroke definitions.

This is a real problem when one editor uses one keystroke to
accomplish a function, and another editor uses a different keystroke
for the same function. You can never learn which keystroke to use
for each editor. This makes editing extremely error-prone, and it
can slow you down by an order of magnitude.

I like the software formatting, great.
But I wonder why the variable spaces to nicely get the left border straight
in the above text.
Spaces are as apuse in spoken text, all these different pauses between words..

Personally I use 'joe' in Linux, it is great for programming, reminds a bit
of wordstar.
My last DOS editor was 'boxer' even have a license for it.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

Sigh! One cannot price nostalga!

Sure, some have a PDP10 at home.

 

[Chuck Harris]

Sure, some have a PDP10 at home.

I have a working PDP8/E in my shop... I probably ought to
turn it on sometime, and see if it is still working, or if
my memory of its working is just nostalgia.

I would sure like to find a nice Tektronix 4010 (or 4012),
or ASR33 to go with the 8/E... Something about using a Pentium
laptop with 20G HD to act as a terminal for a PDP8/E
bothers me.

-Chuck

 

[Jan Panteltje]

I have a working PDP8/E in my shop... I probably ought to
turn it on sometime, and see if it is still working, or if
my memory of its working is just nostalgia.

I would sure like to find a nice Tektronix 4010 (or 4012),
or ASR33 to go with the 8/E... Something about using a Pentium
laptop with 20G HD to act as a terminal for a PDP8/E
bothers me.

I have an old NEC cashier terminal with RS232 in the attic.
All TTL, looks futuristic
But it is kaput, started fixing it, but no diagram, use the PC for
terminal was easier.
It was in an unheated space, died when it once was -20 C.
No microprocessor that I could find, all true TTL!

 

[Jan Panteltje]

I have an old NEC cashier terminal with RS232 in the attic.
All TTL, looks futuristic

Actually it is a NCR, not NEC, just looked.

 

[Ian Bell]

this sounds good, can't quite figure out how to convert capture libraries
and schematics....
I quote from ftp site:

snip


....it is quite unfortunate that there is no development support for these
tools, in fact it would be nice to be able to convert orcad pcb layout
files too...

I do not know the answers to these questions myself. But there is a very
active Kicad user group at yahoo which I moderate. I know many users have
successfully imported Orcad libraries so if you join the group I am sure
they will be able to tell you exactly what to do. The yahoo group is at:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/

HTH

ian