• Mood: amused

Today's random amusement: ancient CAD programs.

This morning I did an hour-long class on OnShape, which is a modern spiffy CAD (computer-aided design) program that runs in your browser and stores documents in The Cloud and does all the heavy computation on the server side. It's pretty cool, and they have a free license for hobbyist use if you don't mind all your designs being public.

In the class, I mentioned that most of my previous experience was from the undergraduate mechanical engineering class on using CAD that I took in 1994, and I had imprinted pretty hard on the program we used then and still had a copy running in an emulator. This led to a bit of good-natured teasing about "something better than DOS-based CAD programs" later in the class, which inspired me to do a thing this evening to show off why I like it -- the UI is really quite excellent for quick usage by power users while still being usable by less-experienced people.

And so I did a short speed run, replicating the drawing we'd done in class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAIgH_nn_DU

There are all kinds of improvements that have come in the 25 years since this CAD program was created (particularly in what you can do with a drawing like this once it's drawn), but I'm curious if he'll manage to beat my time.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.