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Millenial days (1998..2003)

Harry Eaton:

I did quite a lot with PCB in that time. Thomas of course had started it, and he wrote a really good skeleton on which to build. At the point that I first found it, it was pretty much a two-layer drawing program. It had no sense of connectivity, no planes, and no gerber output. I add all of these things in the late 90's which made it much more suitable for real layout.

Besides the significant task of handling netlists and figuring out actual connectivity of what was drawn, I also created the infrastructure to allow fast region-based searching. This allowed those other features to work reasonably quickly which was important because computers weren't all that fast back in those days. Once the region searching was in place I used it to dramatically improve the drawing speed, by clipping the on-screen drawing to draw only the part that was actually changing, only drawing once. This too made it much more usable.

At the time, in my job I used a Mentor Graphics PCB tool that had even more advanced features, but when running through a remote X-session it was quite slow because it would usually re-draw things multiple times and seemed to draw everything on the whole board each time. I made PCB way better than that in that regard.

One feature that the original PCB had which I always kept was the ability to draw arbitrary copper which was something that the professional tools made nearly impossible but is often useful. Later I added DRC checks and many other features. I stopped working on PCB a couple of years after my son was born, as being a parent started taking all my time. By then DJ and Dan were working a lot on it.

What happened to version 2.0

Dan McMahill:

harry had reserved the right to be the one to make an official 2.0 release. So what was happening is in CVS [from 2003 on], the version (set in the configure.ac file) was typically set to something like 1.99t. Then I would branch the code in CVS and on the release branch set the version to a snapshot like "20030825". Right after the branch I'd bump the version in CVS to the next letter like 1.99u. I honestly don't remember what happened when we got to 1.99z with that. The README file in git which documents the snapshot release procedure gives guidance about that.

So that is pretty much the story with 2.0. It was something harry planned but never happened. He became a father and that became a more important thing in life (as it should be) than pcb!

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