Retro AutoCAD is so very cool to see. Having personally over the years cultivated and documented a collection of historical Autodesk software, events, images, and memorabilia (Autodesk History Gallery), it was a pleasure to find someone else that shares this love of old design tools. It is amazing to see how far things have come and evolved or changed in the past 37’ish years and then thinking what it might look like 10-37 years from today.
I have a working AutoCAD 2.18 circa 1984 as well as disks for almost every reelase of AutoCAD 1.0 and up but I am unable to get anything older than 2.18 to run due to the limited old hardware that it required. Specifically the challenge has been the graphics card and in 2.18 there was a generic IBM display driver that allows me to use most any graphics emulation to run successfully. It took me a long time figuring out AutoCAD 2.18 would not run if installed on a hard drive larger than 10Mb, imagine that, 10Mb which is smaller than most thumb…