Which AutoCAD release is the best when compared with its predecessor?

After a month and 204 votes, I have now closed the poll that asks the above question, but it can still be found in the polls archive.

There were 20 choices, so you might expect an “average” release to attract 5% of the votes. You might also expect there to be relatively few votes for the older releases, because the newer the release, the more likely it is to be within a voter’s experience. All releases being equal, you might therefore expect the oldest releases to have about 0% and the newest about 10%, with a gradually rising straight line between them.

Of course, not all releases were equal. There has been a huge variation in the quality of releases over the years, so it’s remarkable how closely the poll follows that rising-line description. However, there are a couple of major exceptions that insert a major spike in the graph. Those exceptions are Release 14 with 23% of the vote, and its closest rival AutoCAD 2000. That isn’t very close at all (12%), despite introducing the major and easily remembered benefit of the multiple document interface.

It’s hard to argue with Release 14 being so highly regarded, being such a huge performance and stability improvement over its infamous predecessor. The list of new features in Release 14 was tiny in comparison with that of Release 13, but they generally worked properly. There was also a concerted effort to improve raw performance, and it paid off. Release 14 did wonders for Autodesk’s share price. Is there a lesson to be learned there? I think so.

That said, this is one of the few times I find my own opinion to be significantly different to those of most AutoCAD users. Whose is the sad lonesome vote for Release 2.5? Mine. As I’ve stated elsewhere, AutoCAD Version 2.5 was a really, really good release. If you look at some of the things you couldn’t do with 2.1, the improvement was dramatic.

Try to imagine using Version 2.1 of AutoCAD. As well as every zoom and pan taking an age, it wouldn’t let you plot to a file, mirror at an angle, copy objects more than once, trim objects, stretch objects or explode blocks and plines. No ellipses, even pseudo ones; isometric circles required the creation of a circle block that could be inserted with unequal scale factors. You couldn’t even rotate objects without first making them into a block and inserting it at an angle. Version 2.5 also made some important improvements to AutoLISP.

The reputation of Version 2.5 suffered in North America because of the introduction of the hardware lock, but that was removed within the life of the release and should not overshadow the huge leaps forward that were made in only 13 months. In those simpler days, it was possible to produce a new release of AutoCAD in about a year where the features were actually finished. Finished, working, documented and with API support.

For me, the top AutoCAD releases are:

  1. Version 2.5.
  2. Release 12 – major dialogue box improvements with full LISP support, grips, hatching improvements, the first proper Windows release and much more.
  3. Version 2.1 (2.18 to be exact) – the introduction of AutoLISP. This is what moved AutoCAD permanently ahead of its competitors (yes, AutoCAD had serious competition once).
  4. Release 14.
  5. AutoCAD 2000 – the multiple document interface is the obvious change here, but more significant to me was the incorporation of Visual LISP into the core product.

Other notable but underrated releases include Release 11 (paper space and xrefs) and the notorious Release 13. Despite being released in a very unfinished state and with significant performance issues, the number of advances in Release 13 were enormous. That was part of the problem; Autodesk was too ambitious about what features could be completed within the available timeframe.

This entry was posted in AutoCAD, Polls and tagged , , on by .

About Steve Johnson

Steve is the owner of cad nauseam, has been a CAD specialist since 1985. His roles have included CAD management, development, consulting and technical writing. Steve has also been a contributing editor for Cadalyst magazine, President of the Western Australian AutoCAD User Group, and a Vice President of CADLock, Inc. He is also an international veteran fencing champion.

4 thoughts on “Which AutoCAD release is the best when compared with its predecessor?

  1. Herman Mayfarth

    Release 13 did indeed get a bad rap, based on the horribly unfinished state of 13c1 & 13c2.

    However, my own experience with R13c4 was quite good.

    Consider:
    MTEXT (which gave us stacked fractions)
    DIMTXT
    LEADERs (instead of line + solid)
    GROUPS (IIRC)

    As well, being the last & best of the Phar Lap Dos Extender versions, it was quite feasible to run R13 on a 486, which I did for > 1yr.

    Release 14 required, for me, an entire new computer system, plus the change in work habits required by the mandatory transition to the Windows environment.

    In addition, my experience (confirmed by others) was that switching TILEMODE in R14 was 4-5 times (yes, that’s correct, half an order of magnitide) slower than R13 DOS, if your drawings contained any significant number of DIMENSIONs (which mine all do).

    I confirmed it was the DIMENSIONs which were responsible for the atrocious regen times in R14 when switching TILEMODE by EXPLODING them in a test drawing (not an option for production work).

    Reply
  2. Marty Kleiber

    Ah, CAD nostalgia!

    I thought I might be the only person so afflicted!

    About 2.5 – you forgot the introduction of “Undo!” Could there have been a more momentous improvement??

    Picture this: You wish to move some entities. We select them, enter “first point” and then accidentally hit return instead of “Second point.” (It happened to me more times than I care to remember – don’t ask!)

    Autocad would take those entities and fly them to somewhere near Pluto!

    Now to get them back, you had to zoom extents (always a regen – no such thing as redraw… and on a 286 machine that made a huge difference!)

    Then you had to find all the entities (no transparent zooms), select them and move them back into the general vicinity of the rest of your drawing.

    At that point, after several regens (we used to joke about getting caffeine poisoning since we had time to get up and get another cup of coffee during the regen), we could start the move command over…

    Yeah for Undo!

    Reply
  3. Steve Johnson Post author

    Marty, you’re quite right about the importance of U/Undo/Redo in 2.5. I’m glad to see I’m not entirely alone in appreciating the brilliance of that release. 🙂

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.