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I worked with AutoCad from 1986 to 2016, running on MS-DOS. It was superb! I used QEMM for memory management and Lightning Zoom for graphics, running with a 1200x800 card and 21" screen for graphics and 14" monochrome screen for the command text. (I still have a Calcomp 36" 400DPI thermal plotter, but the control buttons went belly up!)
Autocad ran in 32 Bits and the extension simply said "yeah, yeah" to the Microsoft system (640K, "extended to 1024K and then extra memory. When running, Autocad with QEMM would then "infect" MS-DOS, removing the memory barriers and use all 4MB as one continuous lump without any limits. You could also "squeeze" more memory out of, for example, the sound card (which wasn't in use). The memory limit for Autocad was 64MB as one continuous memory partition, but that would have been prohibitively expensive!
The plotter used a SPARC chip - what took Autocad 20 seconds to process when plotting, only took 20/1000 second on the plotter!
When I was forced to use Windows based Autocad at work, from 2000 to 2006, I found it very cumbersome to work with and I never really got the hang of "paperspace". Subsequent Windows versions also, in my opinion, were retrogrades. Now, the software is cloud based, forcing the user to pay a monthly rental.
Those were the days!
Rgds.
Dave
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