My longtime colleague and programming guru Kean Walmsley wrote a great blog post talking about why AutoCAD R13 was painful, but it had to happen to re-architect the product.
I was a customer of R13 and suffered on the heels of a rock solid AutoCAD R12 until the patch R13c4a was released. R13c4a was what the initial release should have been. I joined the company January 1998 when we were releasing R14.01 codenamed Pinetop which was rock solid. Everyone and almost everything experiences growing pains at some point.
3 comments
I was at a 3rd party company trying to release an ARX app at the time. I recall that R13c4a was stable enough for us to work with but it took until R14 to be really right. Also, dropping DOS and Unix to focus on Windows made it easier for us. The combination of Windows NT (3.5 or 4, I can’t remember) and Autocad R14 was the right stuff. Now getting customers to spend the time and money to move to the right platform, that is another story.
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Thank you for your perspective on R13.
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Good stuff Shaan. R13 (pre-c4a) was my first experience using AutoCAD for a real paying job. What an introduction. But once we got c4a, we stayed on R13 even long after R14 came out.
R14 was a jewel, we were just gun shy after being burned on those R13 updates that broke things.
I was at a 3rd party company trying to release an ARX app at the time. I recall that R13c4a was stable enough for us to work with but it took until R14 to be really right. Also, dropping DOS and Unix to focus on Windows made it easier for us. The combination of Windows NT (3.5 or 4, I can’t remember) and Autocad R14 was the right stuff. Now getting customers to spend the time and money to move to the right platform, that is another story.
Thank you for your perspective on R13.
Good stuff Shaan. R13 (pre-c4a) was my first experience using AutoCAD for a real paying job. What an introduction. But once we got c4a, we stayed on R13 even long after R14 came out.
R14 was a jewel, we were just gun shy after being burned on those R13 updates that broke things.