[Question] Evolution of KiCad through the years

Do have…but…?~~~~~~~~~

Before we can publish it, we’re waiting for a confirmation from JP.

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Yeah, the old one doesn’t seem to have the licence statement.

In general, it’s interesting to see how the old wxWidget based UIs are relatively speaking very similar to the current ones. Everything is recognizable.

Continuity between the old TUI interface and wx GUI can be seen easily at least in the About dialog: the layout is identical. If I have understood correctly, the graphic view engine is the same.

wxWidgets (called wxWindows) was used back then. The menus and UI boxes are custom-drawn.

For graphics, wxDC class was used on Windows, and the LIBGRX library on other platforms.

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You mean, even the parts looking text based are actually wx?

Yes, it’s all using DC->DrawText

Kicad was running on MsDos, using LIBGRX graphic library on all (i.e.Windows and Linux) platforms and DJGPP 32 bits compiler on Windows.

Later when wxWidgets( formerly wxWindows version 1.68) was availlable, I converted kicad to wxWidgets , using wxDC and Windows dialogs)

wxWindows 1.68 did not really work on Linux/Unix (not mature) but later wxWidgets worked fine on Linux, and wxWidget was used on all platforms.

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I assume LIBGRX is this: GRX graphics library.

(WxWindows 1.68 was released around 2006 (wxWidgets - Browse /1.68B at SourceForge.net), so can we assume that the KiCad 2006 binary I found was one of the earliest wx versions of KiCad?)
EDIT: no, I was wrong, 1.68 is as old as “Version 1.68 November 1997”.


For the information for those who may be interested : this is the oldest commit in the launchpad bazaar repository:

revno: 1
committer: plyatov
timestamp: Sun 2007-05-06 16:03:28 +0000
message:
Initial import of KiCad.

EDIT: this is also in the git repo, so the bzr repo was imported to git and the old repo doesn’t offer anything interesting.

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Eh, @eelik

Someone’s been slipping.
The founder of Kicad and active developer but no Dev. logo attached to his avatar and lowly basic forum rights. :open_mouth:

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Rene Poschl mentioned XOR rendering in:

I’m not sure if it’s really XOR, but if you look at the magnified screenshot below (from the V4.0.4 picture posted earlier) Then you can see that both green and red are saturated, while the overlap is a mix (average?) of the two colors.

image

In some ways this is superior to the transparency that is used now. When you apply transparency, it’s applied to the whole layer, which reduces overall contrast.

Edit / addition: This worked pretty well for 2 layer PCB’s but on 4 or more layer (see Spaceboy’s remark below) transparency may very well be a better solution.

I don’t know if it’s because you have been used to the old rendering but in my opinion the new, version is better. I don’t want the mixing of two colors to be confusing for me when I have 4 layers

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Heres the dos version

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Works really well!

… at least after installing DOSBox (DOSBox, an x86 emulator with DOS) and cwsdpmi (GitHub - jayschwa/cwsdpmi: Unofficial Git mirror of CWSDPMI, a free DPMI provider for DOS.), opening dosbox, mounting the folder where kicad and cwsdpmi folders are located, running cwsdpmi.exe and running pcbnew.exe.


Summer vacation is great to have, I have time to do all the important stuff which were in the queue but which I had to postpone when I was working.

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Wait so the old KiCad DOS version didn’t have a schematic editor? Or was it that both schematic and PCB editor were more independent (standalone)?

Just download the zip package and look into it.

Up to quite recently they were all separate executables. If the PCB editor crashed with a segmentation fault, the schematic editor just kept on running. Only in the last handful of years this is changing, because it is much easier to exchange data between the different parts if they are a single program.

On my linux box, they still show as separate executables, and can be run in “standalone” mode. I don’t really know more details of how this is done. KiCad rarely crashes, but if either of the PCB or Schematic editors crashes, I think it takes the other with it in the latest few KiCad versions. But it happens so rarely that I’m not sure.

Yeah okay but I was talking about that MS DOS version screenshot. So I assume you had to launch it separately.

Well, yes, recently KiCad crashed for me too for some reason (most possibly for to my low spec hardware running out of resources rather than a fault with KiCad). And it did take all instances with it except for the project viewer if I remember right

Only @ChrisGammell can currently do the avatar logo.

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Actually the Dev group owners should be able to add new people. That’s @Seth_h , @stambaughw , @JeffYoung , and @craftyjon (and since they know who should be on that list, I leave it up to them)

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I didn’t actually even know JP had an account here :slight_smile: But now that he’s popped up, he’s been badged (but he’ll need to enable the display)

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