General > General Technical Chat
1976 PCB design at CERN
floobydust:
I did use a similar minicomputer system by Computervision. Totally outer space in the era, I was in awe every time I used it.
I think it was Compucircuit for PCB CADD on CADDS 4 in the early 80's, with a Calcomp and a photo-plotter for near instant artwork. 16-bit minicomputer I think Data General, 19" Tektronix colour CRT, had a near "washing machine" HDD.
Fundamentally it was all command-line driven, object-oriented using noun and verb statements, none of the crap you see today. The PCB layout was manipulating entities within a database. In that sense it was actually quite powerful, you just had to compose the command and it would do it, no questions asked. Not a great undo feature though.
The digitizer pad was inductive. Pen presses were all macros, so you could program anything you wanted for functions.
The government had bought it for local university $250,000 also for doing IC layout, back in the day to grow technology, big bucks. But the system was massively overpriced. The maintenance contract alone was so expensive the university couldn't afford upkeep/updates so they orphaned the system. It came with no UPS because of the cost, so a thunderstorm was really bad for it, AC mains glitch and it would get scrambled and revert to tape backup. That part really sucked.
There was a CADD boom in the 80's and then the bust.
http://www.cadhistory.net/12 Computervision.pdf
OP's old CERN photo does show a logo- but it's not CV.
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