Daxcad

DAXCAD (CAD) DaxCAD is a 2D Computer Aided Drawing software application written in the early 1980s by Practical Technology Ltd.

DaxCAD was and still is a CAD Package used by a handful of companies throughout the world in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It origins stem from Paisley College of Technology, now known as Paisley University.

DaxCAD was written to be an inexpensive, simple to use CAD application for a range of industries. It was sold in many sectors from government to insurance.

DaxCAD’s main design strength was its simplicity. At that time CAD applications were expensive and difficult to use. DAXCAD offered simplicity with complex drawing functions at fraction of the cost of similar systems.

The project "DaxCAD" was originally conceived as an honours computing project on a Prime 750 mainframe at Paisley College by Neil McKinley. Kirk Ramsey - then a senior lecturer at Paisley College - started a small software company, Practical Technology Ltd in Glasgow around 1984.

The company was founded at a time when CAD was starting to become more commonly available in the form of downsized workstations. The intent of the company was to ride the wave and make as the name suggests, technology practical.

After looking at the existing market offerings for CAD, namely DOGS and CV (ComputerVision), Kirk felt that there was a space for a product which was cheap and easy to use, as both of these packages were enormously expensive and rather hard and complex to learn. The cost of a single Computer Vision workstation could be £50, 000 which made it inaccessible to all but very large companies.

The base platform chosen was Apollo. Apollo was a UNIX implementation similar to Sun. The language chosen for development was Fortran 77. Interestingly the Apollo workstation Operating System - Domain /OS | AEGIS was written in Pascal.



With funding from the Clydesdale bank in place and a small team of local software engineers recruited from Paisley Tech - development of the code began. Apollo offered good quality graphics and within 12 months - DaxCAD Version 1 was ready to be released. A sales team was assembled and DaxCAD was launched.

After a year it was also obvious the PC was fast becoming a second and cheaper alternative to Apollo. Practical Technology found themselves having to plan to downsize an already downsized product. The plan for PC DaxCAD was hatched.

It was an ambitious plan by any standard. To take Fortran 77 code and port it on a PC. Thanks to Microsoft, early PC systems had substantially limiting memory and graphics capabilities. DaxCAD had been designed to run on Unix with superior memory capabilities.

After a year of hard work - DaxCAD PC was launched. It proved to be a success but the software was large and unwieldy. A complex arrangement of overlays using Pharlap meant that the software was slow and unstable. It also meant having to keep two distinct versions of the software as Intel and Motorola processors were designed differently.

The code became littered with a crude form of pre-processors – It marked out the code using the Fortran comment command "C" So if you wanted the code to be available for a PC ( IBM ) then you would surround the code with CIBM. For Apollo - CAPOLLO. Later versions included Sun and there were specified processors for that as well.

And of course the dreaded device drivers had to be written to support mice, monitors, graphics cards.

During this period – RACAL – who had an electronic cad system licensed the use of DAXCAD.

The DAXCAD Macro facility was one of the more powerful features. It also meant that functions could be added by users without major redevelopment. In a move well ahead of its time, BASIC was chosen as a language platform. AutoCAD chose LISP - also powerful but outside the capability of most users. BASIC was something most engineers could use. A perfect example is the illustrious ellipse macro. Apart from the "*" character as a comment - it conforms to a standard BASIC structure. Note that since DAXCAD was based on a VERB - NOUN - MODIFIER command structure - the words that were programmed into the menus could be entered directly into a macro.