Re: gEDA-user: futurenet question

[Arnim Littek <arnim@med-dev.co.nz>]

On Thu, 19 Nov 2003, John Griessen wrote:
> What might be interesting to us on this list,
> is a look at a sample of a futurenet pinlist.  I've never heard of that tool.

Dash/Futurenet, from Data I/O in the late 80s/early 90s before
it got canned.  I used it for front end sch. entry for ASIC work and
later it was the sch. cap tool for Xilinx for a few editions of their
tools, pre-NeoCAD.  Of all of the sch. cap tools I've ever used, it
had the best combination of mouse/kybd work I've ever encountered, and
I could use it as fast as pen and paper to put an idea down.

Was essentially a DOS app, highly optimised assembler all through it,
but got orphaned along the way, for reasons only someone from DataIO
could answer (prima donna programmer no longer available?), when they
went to an inferior Windows-based interface (ECS as I recall).  One of
my colleagues liked it so well he persisted, against the odds and with
lots of bandaid glue scripts, in using it for Xilinx work until well
into the late 90s.  Can probably come up with some netlist info from
Michael, I'll rattle his cage.

FWIW,

Arnim