Autodesk Ltd of London, part of the Sausolito, California-based Autodesk Inc which dominates the MS-DOS personal computer-aided design software market with its AutoCAD products, will soon ship AutoCAD release 10 for 80386 and 80486 personal computers, OS/2 and Xenix 386, and one of its computer-aided design applications, AEC Architectural, for Apple Macintosh II, Sun Sparcstation and 80386 and 80486-based personal computers. AEC Architectural for the Macintosh will be available in early March and makes use of the icon-based graphical user interface and a mouse. In addition, compatibility with the Multifinder multi-tasking system will enable AEC to run concurrently with other applications, and enable drawings to be transferred into other software packages – 250 of such third party software packages are available in the UK. The version for the Sparcstation provides multi-tasking facilities by virtue of the Unix-based SunOS operating system. It will be available in the UK at the end of the month. The personal computer version, offers free access to 16MB of memory by taking advantage of Phar Lap Inc’s 386/DOS extender, improving performance in many areas. AutoCAD-OS/2 is to be shipped next month and supports the use of the full set of OS/2 Presentation Manager tools. AutoCAD-Xenix 386, available this week, offers the option of migrating to a Unix environment without changing hardware, with SCO Xenix supporting access to MS-DOS and Xenix applications running on the same workstation. AutoCAD is installed in 250,000 locations, 20,000 of which are in the UK. For all systems, AutoCAD will sell for UKP2,500 and AEC is UKP1,200.
