Re: gEDA-user: PCB & Gschem

[Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 20:23 25-2-2006, you wrote:
> > > Don't get me wrong, this is a frustration for many people and I'd love
> >
> > But not for all people - not for Eagle, Orcad, Protel etc. users because
> > these companies know how to implement usability.
>
> *chuckle*
>
> Your comment about usability belies a lack of experience.
>
> Orcad is not bad.  But it's clear to me that you have never tried
> using Protel.  It's a buggy POS.  I know since I've used it in the
> past.

Orcad may not be too bad at the moment, but some years ago - around 
1999 - the place where I was working went over from Ultiboard 4.84 
for printed circuit layout to Orcad 9.0, in which the developers 
tried out the "revolutionary" idea of forcing you to use auto-routing 
by blocking any route to manual routing and placement.

Of course, to get auto-routing to work, you had to have added 
placement data to each component in the netlist - and I was looking 
at a fast mixed TTL-ECL design on a triple extended Eurocard, spread 
over about 100 A-4 pages. I'd done the schematic on an earlier 
version of Orcad, expecting to layout using Ultiboard, so there was 
no way that I could have realised that I'd need the placement data 
when it would have been easy to add. POS was one of the kinder 
expressions I used at the time.

Orcad 9.1 came out very shortly afterwards, but I'd moved on by then 
(for reasons that had nothing to do with electronic design software).

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen