Long, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the land, before even the internet and google, in fact in 1993, I commissioned a genius called MDG (who wrote software for me at the time) with the job of buying my business a new computer. The result was my much cherished DIAMOND brand 486-DX2-66MHz. CPU's did not need fans in those days. This machine was top of the range with VESA accelerated disk and graphics cards, and it has served me faithfully until - argghhh - this morning it went belly-up. Thankfully the hard drive is still intact and I have been able to plant it in a DRDOS friendly pentium machine that happened to be handy.
I tried Googling components of this machine in the hope of help, and was met with emotionally loaded words like "antique" and "museum". The idea that anyone might still use such a behemoth is apparently beyond their ken. Our local Apple expert, Joe, sniggers when he comes in the office and I happen to be DOSsing.
Tsien BoardMaker 2 and BoardCapture is why I use this DOS machine. This software is for creating electronic schematics and designing printed circuit boards (PCB). Regrettably Tsien no longer support BM2, wanting instead to rent you their more expensive Windows BM3. But there are still many engineers who still use BM2 because it is so fast (screen redraw on a 486-DX2-66MHz is faster than screen redraw in many Windows graphics programs running on current machines). And because its user-interface is so intuitive. And because, even though it must operate within the DOS 640kbyte memory limit, I have yet to design a board that exceeds its memory limited capacity. And because it does all I want and I know I would have to invest a huge amount of time to learn a new CAD program.
Which only goes to show how HORRIBLY inefficient modern software is. If only programmers now-a-days wrote to the same standards as that in BM2, think how powerful their software would be.
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