In response to my post about AutoCAD turning 35, my email inbox and twitter feed is full and I am so grateful for the response. It is so amazing to read about when you started using AutoCAD and the stories about Autodesk and also the photos. A little known fact is AutoCAD 1.0 wasn’t shipped to customers so the first release was actually AutoCAD version 1.1.
Here is quote from a customer that started on the very first shipping AutoCAD version.
Daniel J. Bounds
Mechanical Designer
Armstrong World Industries / Armstrong Building Products
Lancaster, PA
I started using AutoCAD in 1984 with Release 1.1 on the 5 ¼” floppy disk. I used it on an original IBM PC with 2 floppy drives. I think the PC was 2 megahertz or maybe 4. The AutoCAD program came on 1 disk. The AutoCAD program disk had to be in Floppy Drive A: and saved .dwg files on Drive B: If you only had one Floppy Drive. AutoCAD would prompt you to remove the AutoCAD program disk and insert a disk to save your drawing on. …