A comment from Kal on Between the Lines mentions an AutoCAD Release 10.5 for Mac. My memory of ancient and useless AutoCAD trivia is usually pretty good, but this time things are a bit foggy and I need some help. I definitely remember there being some kind of half-release of AutoCAD for Mac*, but I’m not sure it was an official designation.
I do remember a Cadalyst review at the time, possibly by Art Liddle. I would estimate it to be from 1989, give or take a year. The then-new Mac release reviewed was some kind of hybrid between R10 and R11 (I think), with most of the feature set of one release and the DWG format of another. I had thought the product was called R11, but I could be wrong about that and maybe it was 10.5.
Is there anybody out there with a complete set of Cadalyst issues that goes back that far? Mine only goes back to mid-1995. If so, can you locate that review?
* Two decades ago, with a much smaller and simpler code base that was already non-platform-specific, Autodesk had to cobble together a hybrid release to provide native Mac support. How much harder would that task be today?
Steve,
AutoCAD on the MAC
A Personal Look at AutoCAD on the Macintosh II;
June 1989, page 51, David Cohn.
Couldn’t resist posting this before putting the mag’ back in its place on the shelf;
“Apples’s Macintosh II is a dream computer, an absolute joy to use. AutoCAD on the Mac is full-power AutoCAD in a multi-tasking environment.
Forget DOS commands like Dir of Copy. In fact, forget about typing commands at all. Apple’s totally windowed, mouse-driven interface lets you copy files or run applications by simply clicking on the appropriate icon.”
I trained on v2.5 & 2.6 in late 1986 and did a year or so of production stuff before going to work at an Apple dealership for a few years. We had a working demo copy of the AutoCAD for the Mac, and seemed to work OK to me.
I’m not sure what I think about the idea of a new Mac version. I bet it would really jack up the pressure to do a Linux version, though!