• AutoCAD Release 13 (November 1994): 6 – Many of you will remember this most infamous of all AutoCAD releases. Too ambitious, long overdue yet released too early, full of bugs, terribly unreliable, markedly slower than its predecessor. Why have I still given it 6? Because of all the many highly useful UI improvements and drafting features it introduced; there were such a huge mass of them I won’t even attempt a summary. Because when running on NT and decent hardware it wasn’t actually that unreliable; running on 16-bit Windows was to blame for a lot of crashes. Because by the time of the final version (R13c4a – the twelfth!), it was not that bad at all, and because Autodesk provided excellent customer service by sending R13c4 out on CD to every registered customer. Because it introduced ARX, allowing C++ developers to do things with AutoCAD that had been impossible before. Because it came with a huge slab of printed documentation (sorry, rainforests). With lots to like as well as dislike, Release 13 was the ultimate curate’s egg release.
• AutoCAD Release 14 (February 1997): 9 – A big performance effort, masses of bug fixes and many other practical improvements (e.g. hatching, draw order, fully functional object properties toolbar) mark this out as the sort of release that people remember for all the right reasons. The new stuff in this release was added because it would be useful to customers, not because it looked good in an advertisement. Bonus (later Express) Tools gave us a lot of handy stuff, even if it wasn’t officially supported. R14 was an upgrade done right.
• AutoCAD 2000 (March 1999): 8 – A CAD application being able to open more than one drawing at a time might seem an obvious requirement, but it took until this release for us to get it, and very glad of it we were too. The property palette, layer dialog and lots of right-click options represented worthwhile UI improvements. The integration of Visual LISP (acquired during the R14 cycle as Vital LISP) and access to ActiveX functionality represented a revolution for LISP programmers. Very good upgrade.
• AutoCAD 2000i (July 2000): -2 – What a difference a year makes! Yes, a that’s minus two for this initial attempt at an annual release (Autodesk didn’t make the timing work for another couple of releases). An emphasis on largely irrelevant-to-users Internet features intended to make Autodesk look all hip and now (anyone tried to access the Point A site lately?), a tie-in to Internet Explorer, annoyingly intrusive UI changes and the removal of the Express Tools, together with a dearth of genuinely useful new features (double-click editing being a noble exception) made this an upgrade only in name. The new Autodesk logo failed to wow customers, who stayed away in droves (at the time we still had that option, and exercised it when we failed to see value for money in an upgrade). A joke at the time was that the ‘i’ stood for ‘ignore’. Worst. Upgrade. Ever.
• AutoCAD 2002 (June 2001): 3 – The bad things in 2000i were still there in 2002, so that’s a net 0. At least it retained the AutoCAD 2000/2000i DWG format in what was to become a regular 3-year DWG/API cycle, useful for customers and developers. The handful of useful additions (e.g. more associative dimension stuff) didn’t add up to much of an upgrade. At least it was an upgrade, in contrast to the downgrade its immediate predecessor represented.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.