VAX-11/7xx Electronic CAD Software?

________________________________ Von: Don North <ak6dn at mindspring.com> An: Gesendet: 7:47 Montag, 23.Juni 2014 Betreff: Re: VAX-11/7xx Electronic CAD Software? On 6/21/2014 10:26 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: I was in DEC h/w engineering from '75 thru '82. Most of the systems designed and produced prior to about 1980 or so had manually drawn schematics, by draftsmen on vellum. Most of these are pretty obvious to identify by looking at the copies of the maintenance print sets. The netlists for these boards were manually transcribed to text to be transferred to the PCB layout systems. PCB layout was done on standalone PDP-15 systems with an attached graphics display, button console, etc, using DEC custom software. Starting in '79 or so DEC engineering imported the 'SUDS' system from Stanford, which allowed for graphical schematic design. Here is a reference: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/engineering/The_Stanford_Univers… SUDS itself ran on DEC-10s. Users sat at dedicated 11/34+VS60 graphics terminals. Typically a DEC engineering site might have two to three SUDS stations for use by engineers (or for lab techs entering schematics for old school engineers who did not know how to use these new fangled computer devices). SUDS terminals were a sought after resource. I don't know how many overnights I spent at a SUDS terminal back then, but it was more than a few. The PDP-11/44 and 11/24 were designs done on SUDS, as was the VAX-11/730. You can recognize the SUDS schematic pages as the might have the 'default' drawn-by signature of 'S. Foonly' in the title box. They will also have the file name of the page in the title box, something like: ? [160,1257]XXXX.DRW PCB layout was still done using the legacy PDP-15 systems, but the netlist could be exported from SUDS. I don't know if SUDS was ever ported to a VAX host (it would have been a lot of work, as I believe it was written in Macro-10). At least while I was around in the early 80s one of the key reasons to keep a KL-10 at each DEC engineering site was as a SUDS host. How long SUDS remained in use after '82 (when I left) I can't say.