Windows seems to tempt, if not force, developers to take a multi-menu approach to things that wasn't needed under DOS.

Consequently, Windows applications become slow and cumbersome due ot their need for mouse-based operations that provide a new "mode" each time a new level of menu is selected. As a result, you use up 2-3 minutes doing what took one keystroke to do in the DOS application. It's common.

Once OrCAD acquired MicroSIM and adopted their approach to Windows, you could easily see OrCAD circling the bowl.

Under DOS, and particularly with the "386+" versions of their DOS-based tools, nothing seems to take more than half a second, aside, perhaps, from a complete autoroute of a PCB. However, even OrCAD's DOS-based "IDE" or "shell" called "ESP," made things painfully cumbersome and certainly misled many people into believing it would automate what it really didn't.

Running the OrCAD tools from the command line and using batch files to migrate from, say, SDT (schematic capture) to VST (digital simulation) or PCB, was quick and effective. Fortunately, in order to maintain compatibility with the current OrCAD tools, it's possible to take output from the "386+" tool set and import it into Capture. I haven't yet tried to move PCB artifacts from DOS to Layout or Allegro, but I doubt it will be as easy. What's more, the move to WIndows has thoroughly messed up PSpice, which worked fine under DOS in v5.0. When v5.2 (for Windows) came out, it was in the toilet.

There are some pretty passable tools for layout under Windows, but the schematic capture offering is not very pleasant to use. Since I draw many more schematics than board layouts, I don't let this keep me from using the DOS version, which I find very useful.

RE