[rag on a muffin]

hi all,
i am a regular on the powerbooks forum, but stepped into new territory for a quick question on software:

i got a job in an architect office as a paid intern, and doing auto-cad, unfortunately on a dell, with a whopping 64 megs of ram, which cant stand any load i put on it.

i would love to do cad on my mac, but they are teaching me auto-cad, and thats all they know.

could someone tell me the CLOSEST mac cad program, as in practically a clone? this would be great.

recently, we had some computers stolen, for some reason the thieves were very stupid, and stole some of the cheap computers, not even ones worth anything to todays standards (Pentium 3s)

because of the thievery, and the constant crap of windows, they thought to switch to some inexpensive macs (like an imac, or ibooks), and said they would not mind a change in programs, as in no big leaps.

can anyone help me with this situation? (no virtual PC please, i might as well support microsoft by using their systems.)

with these picky guidelines (sorry bout that) what CAD program would be the best?

thanks in advance.

[larkost]

AutoCAD is a force onto itself. I don't think you are going to be able to get away from it in architecture.

[Timo]

I've found nothing on the Mac platform that's even remotely like Autocad, for good or for bad.

[larkost]

Oh.. ya.. you should probably check out Archintosh. If you are going to find answers, they are likely to be there.

[Siskomac]

Sounds like a hell of a professional architect firm.

[rag on a muffin]

seem like you guys are right, i guess we are stuck with the productive autocad, and the counterproductive winblows. oh well, thanks anyways.

[nooon]

VectorWorks is pretty decent.

[dennisbolt]

minicad ( I used it on a mac a few years back, so unsure how it is now)

or is it vectorworks now?

[kennedy]

I used IntelliCAD on my Mac for quite a while.
As best I could tell it was a very good AutoCAD clone...
but I am an AutoCAD neophyte... I was just using it to
open the files from my architects, make little changes
to clearly communicate back to them... so nothing too
advanced. It was low-cost shareware when I picked it
up.

But then they went commercial... there's a consortium
of sorts at www.intellicad.org and dozens of companies
that sell IntelliCAD as commercial products now... but
most seem to be PC-only... though the original core was
cross-platform.

So, not sure where you can get it any more. They seem
to have purged all the old sites providing the "free"
version... and they don't make it easy to find who
provides a Mac version.

But if you can find a Mac version of IntelliCAD, that'll
solve your problem!

[daveyheats]

Well for 3d work I know Archicad have a macintosh version as I use it for Uni work. 2d work tho, I presumed there was a mac version of autocad?