Re: 20 years is a lot of time.
I still run a version of Protel PCB layout tools in DosBox for the odd board I need to design. Does that count? The old version was free, ran on 286's. It screams on a modern machine in dosbox as you might guess. It just makes PCB artwork that's still accpeted by every major fab house and usable for contact printing in house.
The new version of protel tools costs several tens of thousands of dollars and has added so many features you need to hire a dedicated guy to study and use it all day to stay up with it, buy component libraries with pinouts and definitions for schematic capture instead of just saying "give me a qfp 32 here". and for small scale use is the very definition of impractical.
Perhaps things like this are why some people keep using the old stuff? IT works, it's simple, the learning curve is less, and they get on with doing their business instead of giving all hope of profit to some over complex tool creator.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
