[geeks] CAD and wireframes Was:This would make a good workstation

[Michael Schiller]

On Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 10:29 PM, vance at neurotica.com wrote:

> I'm not sure about a direct speed comparison, but I know that the
> featuresets are *completely* different.  The IBM cards are designed for
> CAD, so they can do all sorts of complex interpolations and 
> extrapolations
> for taking measurements in CAD software.

Back a few years ago when I still had a real job (back in the mid 90's) 
I was looking for an app that could take a scan of a part drawing and 
convert it from a bitmap to a usable vector format. Kind of the way OCR 
takes a scan and makes text out of it. At the time I didn't find any 
solution, and so just stored the bitmap images, to print out on paper 
as needed. The originals were drawn between 1894 (the earliest ones) to 
1948 (the latest one I'd seen), and were becoming brittle, so I didn't 
want to have to use them in every day use anymore.

At this point in time is there an app that can do this? And even better 
yet, is there one that can read the drawings, and convert them into a 
format that can be used by a CNC milling machine? This was another goal 
I had, I had setup a machine shop to make our parts, and I was looking 
into getting a CNC mill, a few I saw could read autocad files which got 
me on the thought of scanning in all the drawings (there were about 
1000 of them)

I'm just asking now out of curiosity, as I'm no longer involved with 
that company, but I did work there for 20 years, so I'm kind of still 
interested.

-Mike
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