If you read the word “Floppies” and scratched your head, you might be less than 30 years old and never seen what we had to work with to store data and install products back in the early days. There were 3.25, 5, and 10” floppies back in the early AutoCAD days and platforms like DEC, Zenith, Victor, Sun, and good ol’ IBM DOS.
I grabbed some of my AutoCAD 2.x and earlier floppies and am using my native retro cad 286 machine to reclaim any more data from the floppies to run them as well as archive for all time in digital. You can see on my floor in my home office AutoCAD 1.x and 2.x floppies as well as my DWG floppies from COMDEX 1984 and Autodesk CAD Camera. Floppies this old are hit and miss getting good data since they are meant to last 35 years especially around magnetic fields produced by lights and power, but I do get lucky and get good files off them some of the time.
My hope was to have my retro cad machine to run native early days Autodesk software for everyone to try at events like AU London or Las Vegas, but the COVD-19 pandemic altered those plans, or delayed them at least for the time being. It i fun running AutoCAD 1.x and 2.x natively on old hardware to understand how far the product has come in over 35 years and it is geeky fun too.
