[HBR] Program to draw circuit diagrams?

[Walt Hutchens]

One advantage to being old is you have enough history to have
forgotten some useful stuff that you can -- sometimes -- recover.
Suddenly a few weeks ago I remembered that twenty years back, in
another life, I had a drawing program that worked, just before a
life-vortex swept in and sucked up my time and attention for a decade.

BUT -- I remembered seeing that software on the shelf here. So I got
down Autosketch 1.02 or something like that and sure enough, it
installs and plays under Win XP. Still no set of radio symbols though,
and a couple of hours of digging around disclosed that scanning
produces bit mapped symbols (.bmp, ...) while drafting programs like
Autosketch use vectors (.dxf is one format). Programs to translate bit
mapped objects to vector format exist but most of them are pricy and
the free one I found got pretty confused trying to handle a pentode
vacuum tube. It would be faster to draw new symbols by hand than to
fix those translations.

AND THEN I remembered that I still had the computer on which I used
Autosketch back then. Getting a 32 MHz Gateway with (I think) 48 megs
of memory going again under Win 3.1 took me on a tour past a hard
drive with permanent damage to the boot area, dead floppy disks, a
mechanical serial trackball with tired LEDs (plus the usual internal
gunk), and a whole lot of stuff I had to relearn about using DOS and
Win 3, but two weeks later it's working and I have ported a couple of
circuit diagrams I drew in '94 that have the most-needed symbols.

I still have to look for some sort of symbol library on the Gateway;
surely I didn't draw them as needed. I have to learn to use Autosketch
beyond my current see Spot run skill level. And I'm going to further
tidy up the Win 3 installation so that any future effort to use that
system will be easier.

It was just luck that this recovery was practical: Some parts of what
I needed had drifted away so I had to get replacements to work and
some of those were in uncool condition. Among the biggest issues:
about half of my 3-1/2" floppies from those days had multiple
unrecoverable errors. I had several sets of Win 3 system diskettes but
the system I'm running now is from the disks that came with the
Gateway machine about '92: 5-1/4" floppies for which it has the drive.

One thing I'd do differently next time is try the floppies on other
drives if available. Floppy drives are individuals; even when
spanking clean some work better than others. AND I'll always have a
machine with a floppy drive on hand as that's the only easy way to
exchange data with Win 3 systems -- no USB back then!

Serial mice and keyboards are rare now and PS/2 is fading fast; I'll
save a couple against future needs.

DOS 6.22 came up without trouble but if you take the defaults then
about half way through the install of WIN 3 it switches the monitor to
a mode that isn't supported by either of my (fairly old) flat panel
displays: I need to figure out what to say about the monitor (plug and
pray was still a few years in the future ...) to get the FPs to work.

Anyway, it looks like I have all the parts of a way to draw decent
circuit diagrams. Autosketch is quite a bit faster on a 3 GHz machine
than on a 32 Mhz one.

Walt Hutchens
KJ4KV