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Re: LTspice Genealogy - The Heritage of Simulation Ubiquity


 

Hello, a.s.

I'm impressed by the work you have put in on this.

I would like to add one note, which I have peripherally mentioned in the list before. Newcomers are likely to not remember or never have known what the "state of computing" was when spice began in the early 1970s. I encountered it on machines limited to punch-card input and line printer output, only. You submitted "job decks" (and some still refer to a netlist as a "spice deck"); woe unto you who dropped one of those punch card boxes! And the reams of fanfold paper needed to print out the initial node conditions plus the response of selected nodes. The response was an "ASCII graph" with an even time step. I don't know if it was computed on an even time step or if it was interpolated after the fact.

An important part of this as that as long as the machine ran FORTRAN, accepted punch card input and did line printer output, spice would run. There were no issues of "operating system" or cross-platform behavior. I saw it run on big IBM mainframes and CDC6400s.

I think that it was the graphic user interface that really pushed various implementations into one OS or another. It was simply too hard to do a two-OS implementation (for the most part).

So, maybe one of the important anchor points in your timeline ought to be when GUIs began to be made as an integral part of the various spice versions.

Thans for all your great work.

Jim Wagner
Oregon Research Electronics

On Jul 18, 2013, at 9:08 AM, analogspiceman wrote:

Please visit this new page at the LTwiki.



It is still "under construction" and I would appreciate your
suggestions for corrections, omissions noted or improvements
needed. -- a.s.

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