On Thu, 19 Nov 2003, John Griessen wrote:
What might be interesting to us on this list, is a look at a sample of a futurenet pinlist. I've never heard of that tool.
Dash/Futurenet, from Data I/O in the late 80s/early 90s before it got canned. I used it for front end sch. entry for ASIC work and later it was the sch. cap tool for Xilinx for a few editions of their tools, pre-NeoCAD. Of all of the sch. cap tools I've ever used, it had the best combination of mouse/kybd work I've ever encountered, and I could use it as fast as pen and paper to put an idea down.
It was certainly the best I've used, but I know people who thought it was too complicated. My recollection is that Data I/O replaced it with Synario, which I used for Lattice devices for a couple of years, but it wasn't nearly as good as the DOS Futurenet. I think most of the old tools had a hard time transitioning to Windows.
I've occasionally wondered if Data I/O would give away the Futurenet code. I think they've given up on schematic capture, and it certainly couldn't hurt them. Anyone fancy asking them ? :)
Evan
