AutoCAD and Interactive

[John Sparks]

Last week I posted a message asking for help in getting the SCO version of i
AutoCAD working for Interactive. 
In that message I stated that the program worked except for the ADI screen 
driver (which is SCO specific).

Well I must apologize for mistating something. After posting the above and
getting a bunch of responses of others interested in the same goal as I;
I went back and tried to re-install SCO AutoCAD on my machine to answer
some questions some people had. 

To make it short, I was wrong. The ACAD program file won't even load under
interactive. It has some SCO specific parts in the file so that it is not
even recognized as a binary program file under Interactive. The reason I
was mistaken is that it's been about a year since we tried to install 
the SCO version, and in the intermin, we have went through about 2 or three
other platforms for AutoCAD (we have several types of machines around here, and
I was getting shuffled from one platform to another there for a while. Back on
unix now) So I got confused and misremembered that it did work when it did not.

I decided to send this as a posting rather than email to all those who were
in contact with me to both save me a bunch of mailing and to appologize to 
all those others out there who read my first posting.

Our programmers here who have looked at the file say that it shouldn't be too
hard to get Interactive to support reading of that SCO binary file, so there
may still be hope after all.

Oh, and I found out that ADI support and drivers are to be done by third parties
not AutoDESK. In other words, if Interactive wants AutoCAD to work on ISC,
the ISC has to write and support the ADI drivers. AutoDESK supplies the 
specs needed to write such drivers, and Interactive would have to contact
AutoDESK to get them.

BUT>>> There is no excuse for AutoDESK to compile the AutoCAD binaries so that
they only run under SCO. There is from my understanding a common binary format
that both SCO and Interactive can read and use. Why wasn't this done?

One other point we found out that may be an influence why there is AutoCAD for
SCO only. My boss called around and he told me that SCO supports technical help
for the SCO version of AutoCAD. If you have a problem with it you don't call
AutoDESK, you call SCO. At least that's what I was told by my boss. So maybe
Interactive needs to contact AutoDESK and volunteer to write and support an
Interactive version of AutoCAD before we will see one on Interactive.


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