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The mythical version of AutoCAD with hardware components?

H

hunterjwizzard

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Long ago in the forgotten time known only as "highschool", departed friends and I often exchanged forbidden burnt disks containing the latest in cutting-edge software of which we were most certainly not supposed to have. I will speak no more on this specific count, save to say that it bridges into my question.

In this now-lost epoch, in whispered tones, a friend once spoke to me of a version of AutoCAD owned by his father, which included not only a hardware dongle but also a 5.25" drive-bay device, which I believe contained a standard 3.5" drive in a mobile rack but was branded by AutoDesk. This was supposed to be on of the highly expensive professional-grade versions of AutoCAD, very much un-like the cheap student versions available to us in that stygian realms of that one semester drafting class.

I wish to know more of this ancient, forgotten software version known only to government contractors, and people with too much money.









(In case anyone is curious: yes, I did spend the weekend listening to an collected works of HP Lovecraft audiobook while working on old computers)
 
Are you sure it was an Autodesk product and not a third party addon that itself needed some dumb dongle arrangement?
Even for the early Silicon Graphics releases the worst you had was a nodelocked license generated from the system's ethernet MAC address. Apprently PC builds had parallel port dongles but I've never seen those.
 
I am pretty sure I recall Autocad using dongles back in around '90-94 when I was doing systems and network admin at an engineering firm that used a lot of AutoCAD (and a bit of Microstation). I do believe that we were still on 5.25" floppies at that point, though of course most software and documents were loaded and saved through the Novell Netware network. (We would definitely not be putting data files on floppies except to transfer them outside of the company.)

Anyway, if you could give us some approximate dates, that would help. I have no idea when you were in high school.
 
I was in highschool from 1999 to 2003. I can't say what year this conversation happened but the version was not new.

I know the 5.25" bay device contained a hard disk with related software files on it. My friend tried an extremely rudimentary "cracking" of the software by copying the contents of the disk to his own computer. Obviously it didnt work.
 
What the op is describing sounds more like the early portable Catia versions that forked into rs6000/x86 with specialized hardware to access catias proprietary monolithic server.

All autocad revs had a ltp dongle that was usually mounted inside the case as a pass through on the parallel port, many times the dongle only works if it’s attached to a printer

Hardware dongles are the bane of my existence.

I have some extremely expensive software that uses the same dongle as autocad, the company is out of existence

I want to migrate the software (which I can) but the dongle drivers block me past windows xp (I get away with 2k targeted drivers)

I have experimented with keeping the software on a virtual copy of 98se but then I need to use a 3rd party hack to simulate the dongle since a physical LPT port won’t work for virtualization.
 
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Care to share what software this is? I'm just curious. I don't often get to hear much about the wide world of "extremely expensive software" that I find so fascinating.

As for your specific problem, its possible to build some pretty rippling XP 32 bit systems. Is this software even capable of taking advantage of more powerful hardware past the Core2Duo era?
 
Here's what I know about AutoCAD and it's not much. Back in the early 90's, a close neighbor of mine was a contractor doing design work for a large automobile manufacturer in the Detroit area. He worked at home long before it was ever fashionable. Every once in a while he would give me an older set of AutoCAD which were on 3.5 floppy's. I had absolutely no use for AutoCAD, but I did enjoy loading it up on my state of the art 486SX and watching the thing build NYC's St. Paul's Cathedral, a turbine engine of some sort, the space shuttle, and few other demos that I can't remember. Never had a dongle.
 
Agent Orange said:
Here's what I know about AutoCAD and it's not much. Back in the early 90's, a close neighbor of mine was a contractor doing design work for a large automobile manufacturer in the Detroit area. He worked at home long before it was ever fashionable. Every once in a while he would give me an older set of AutoCAD which were on 3.5 floppy's. I had absolutely no use for AutoCAD, but I did enjoy loading it up on my state of the art 486SX and watching the thing build NYC's St. Paul's Cathedral, a turbine engine of some sort, the space shuttle, and few other demos that I can't remember. Never had a dongle.
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Yeah my understanding is then as now autodesk had varying "versions" with more or less powerful features depending on how much you paid. So they had a really stripped-down student version which I used in my highschool drafting class, then you had more feature-rich professional drafting versions for the people designing houses and cars. And then you had "advanced" versions for designing aircraft carriers. This is generally where you got into hardware dongle territory and they could be ridiculously expensive & tightly controlled. Supposedly there was a version as early as the late 90s that after you'd gotten through designing an entire nuclear submarine the software could break it down for you and tell you how to build it in modules.

These are the sorts of things I want to know more about. Not the ability itself because thats obvious now, just what these versions were called, what they were like, etc.
 
I've used AutoCAD R2.6. That didn't require a dongle but I got it on a machine, so I have no idea how clean it was
I've used AutoCAD R10 and that too didn't come with a dongle in the box. Seemed to install and ran fine though it's been pre-registered to a different individual.
Same for R12. Came in The Big Box with genuine 3.5" disks and worked without a dongle (just ignore it's registered to my highschool...)
The real fun starts with the R12 Advanced Modelling Extension, which required you to mail off an install-generated string and AutoDesk would mail back a validated string which was your hardware locked key.
R13 for Irix like I mentioned above used nodelocking so it didn't need a dongle, but Discrete used both nodelocking AND a dongle
R12 on a classic mac didn't require a dongle either, but Mac are especially nasty with ADB dongles and software tiering.

I keep forgetting the application suite but it absolutely was not an AutoDesk product in favor of some of the most evil use of dongles I've ever seen outside of Visi ON using the serial number of the mouse and a kids toy in the 2000's using the toy itself as a software protection dongle. Base (circuit design?) CAD product came with a dongle, but all the add-ons also required dongles. When ordering the base application and at least one add-on you sent the dongle in for a box that had the dongle plus sockets to fit many more dongles. A fully-loaded suite looked like a power strip with dongles hanging out the back of the machine and I'm sure cost as much as the GDP of a small country.
I am not thinking of Notator for the ST. That was its own case of Stupid.
 
AutoCAD dongles were definitely a thing, but I believe they were mostly used outside North America. Here is one from 2.1. Later versions used Rainbow Sentinel dongles.

1701906233747


As for the 5.25" device, I doubt that was any form of copy protection. Probably just an AutoDesk branded drive sled. Maybe even just a sticker somebody slapped on.
 
Aside from the AutoCAD issue, the only software dongle that I ever used was on a proprietary piece of investigative software used for telco intercepts when I was with the feds (all court ordered telephone numbers and not voice). The software categorized and sorted various dial out phone numbers. I later wrote a BASIC version of approximately the same thing only I had to resort to a bubble sort as that's all I knew had to do. I wasn't then or am now a programmer but you do what you're told to do. It worked but was terribly slow. I ultimately figured how offload the whole shooting match into a data base and the sort routine worked like a champ. That dongle was a kludge and had to be registered to a certain PC. Also, as I remember, quite expensive.
 
NeXT said:
When ordering the base application and at least one add-on you sent the dongle in for a box that had the dongle plus sockets to fit many more dongles. A fully-loaded suite looked like a power strip with dongles hanging out the back of the machine and I'm sure cost as much as the GDP of a small country.
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This I would like to see!
 
Plasma said:
As for the 5.25" device, I doubt that was any form of copy protection. Probably just an AutoDesk branded drive sled. Maybe even just a sticker somebody slapped on.
Click to expand...
I never thought the drive itself was "copy protection" per-se, seeing as windows could do basic read/writes from it no problem(well, reads, at least). But it was definitely not just a sticker, it was part of the product install and had files related to the software on it.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I never thought the drive itself was "copy protection" per-se, seeing as windows could do basic read/writes from it no problem(well, reads, at least). But it was definitely not just a sticker, it was part of the product install and had files related to the software on it.
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Did you actually see this yourself, or is this second-hand information from your friend? I fail to see the purpose of AutoDesk distributing software on a hard drive that could easily fit on a few CDs.
 
Plasma said:
Did you actually see this yourself, or is this second-hand information from your friend? I fail to see the purpose of AutoDesk distributing software on a hard drive that could easily fit on a few CDs.
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Second hand, I admit. But it was something like 10-15 gigs of files. So not something that could fit on "a few CDs". I believe the files were libraries related to this specific version and what it did.
 
I remember doing a brief semester on 3d modeling in autocad r12. And the textures were on the CDRom. Why I am thinking caddy based, for me it was a 2X NEC drive. I had the 3x at home in my Dell 486...
 
In 1999ish we supported a civil design firm that ran AutoCAD - they used a hard drive in a caddy setup on some machines in order to work from home.
The users would have an identical machine at home. Pentium II 450 machines from Gateway, IIRC.
I believe this was to avoid having another $$$ licensed install at home, and an easy way to work on large projects without dealing with zip disks.
Autodesk would "make an example" out of any small/medium business that was out of compliance, that wasn't fun.
 
westveld said:
In 1999ish we supported a civil design firm that ran AutoCAD - they used a hard drive in a caddy setup on some machines in order to work from home.
The users would have an identical machine at home. Pentium II 450 machines from Gateway, IIRC.
I believe this was to avoid having another $$$ licensed install at home, and an easy way to work on large projects without dealing with zip disks.
Autodesk would "make an example" out of any small/medium business that was out of compliance, that wasn't fun.
Click to expand...
This is what I am thinking it was, a convenient way for the kid's dad to take his work home. With most of the files on the drive being models, not AutoCAD itself.
 
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