Second, this schematic is turned into a board file, where parts and pads are placed, nets are turned into traces, and the mechanical definitions of the board are created. This schematic is simply a collection of parts and symbols tied together with nets. There are three major steps to creating a PCB in any piece of software. If anyone has any insight to what the Protel / Altium legal department was doing a few decades ago, your wisdom is welcome in the comments. This is weird, confusing, and I can’t figure out how this doesn’t violate a trademark. A company called DEX 2020 has also has a PCB design software called AutoTRAX. Interestingly, Protel Autotrax is not the only PCB design software named Autotrax. A freeware version of Autotrax is still available on the Altium website and can be run from inside a DOS virtual machine or DOSBox. Protel was a reaction to this and the first product, Autotrax, was a DOS-based program that brought PCB design to the PC. Back in the day, PCB design on a computer required a dedicated workstation, a lot of hardware, light pens, and everything was extraordinarily expensive. The company we know as Altium today was, for the first fifteen years of its existence, known as Protel. A short history of Protel, Altium, and Autotrax Overall, this series provides for a comparison between different PCB design tools. We learned Fritzing is a joke for PCB design, although it is quite good for making breadboard graphics of circuits. Each of these tutorials serves as a very quick introduction to a specific PCB design tool. We’ve already covered Eagle in this series. In this series, we take a standard reference circuit and PCB layout - a simple ATtiny85 board - and build it with different PCB design tools. This is the continuation of a series of articles demonstrating how to Create A PCB In Everything. Beyond this, I suggest viewing EEVblog #747, where digs into one of his old project, Borland Pascal, and Protel Autotrax.
I’m rolling up my sleeves (about 30 years worth of rolling) and building our standardized test PCB with the tool. But it’s important to know where we came from to understand the EDA tools available now. I’m not recommending anyone actually use Protel Autotrax - better tools with better support exist. Consider this a look at the history of PCB design software. Protel Autotrax is a PCB design tool first released for DOS in the mid-80s.
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