Was there SPICE software available for home computers in the 1980s? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Revan
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 03:58:15 pm
content: If an electrical engineering student wanted to run a SPICE simulation at home back then, was the IBM PC the only computer that had suitable software available, or could they also use a home computer like, for example, an Amiga 500, Atari ST, or less powerful machines?Maybe there are some people here who could share their experiences about this.

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 04:39:01 pm
content: I ran SPICE on my Atari 520STM (upgraded to 1MB) in around 1988 (plus minus). The binary was aprox 350kB, no GUI of course, you had to create netlist in a texteditor. Later on I wrote a program for creating graphs with waveforms from the text outputs (long lists of numbers in columns)..PS: a simulation of a CMOS logic component with say 6-8 transistors took perhaps 30 minutes, as I can remember. Today you get it within XXX milliseconds..

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 06:10:21 pm
content: I ran PSpice on my work computer (386-based IBM clone) in the late 1980s.That version required keeping a 5.25" floppy in the drive: when executing the program on a text file, it would first run the drive, hit a physical hole drilled in the disc, and interpret the error statement to authorize the execution.Before working there, I had run Spice on Hollerith cards on a mainframe at university.

author: chilternview
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 06:39:55 pm
content: I managed to run Spice2G6, the original Fortran version, with a very simple graphing in GEMDOS in an Atari 1040STF in the late 80's. It worked, although it was a bit slow! It was possible to add a 68881 coprocessor to speed up the math but that required hardware hacking. Also tried to get Spice3f5 going on the Atari but the compiler I had, Laser C, was just not quite up to it.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 07:17:14 pm
content: There was also a SPICE version for Amiga (I don't remember the name).

author: Gerhard_dk4xp
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 04, 2025, 01:25:54 am
content: I compiled 2g6 on my AT 80286/287 doped to 10 MHz running Interactive Unix ,but f2c was not good enough as a compiler, not even in the huge memory model.Oh, this memory management in Fortran by indexing out of the borders of an array...I later used pspice or the VAX / Cyber 176 at the univ.Gerhard

author: chilternview
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 04, 2025, 07:36:11 am
content: Quote from: Gerhard_dk4xp on August 04, 2025, 01:25:54 amOh yes, negative array indices too, if I recall correct. And the dreaded LOCF function in Spice that returned the address of a variable, that had to be implemented in assembler.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 08, 2025, 09:20:26 pm
content: We bought the first release of PSPICE for DOS at work. It required a floppy disk to be inserted all the time. They used a packed EXE, which debug could not handle. To add libraries you had to rebuild and link with MicroSoft Fortran. This allowed me to rebuild the EXE unpacked and debug. I changed a bit of code and instant home SPICE for the engineers. EEs were pretty much all running the PCs anyway at home.PSPICE 2.0 had a printer port security dongle to protect it rather than the floppy. Shown is my programmable key which worked up to PSPICE 5.0 (early 90's).

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 08, 2025, 09:24:46 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on August 08, 2025, 09:20:26 pmI found that the reason for keeping the floppy inserted was a hole drilled in the disk, so that the OS would generate an error for parsing.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 08, 2025, 09:40:14 pm
content: There was a spice version for the Amiga, AFAIR it was some PSPICe variant. The 68K based computers like Amiga and Atari ST were relative fast to the PCs of there time. The PCs however more often had an hard drive.As one of my first larger programms I programmed a simple (only linear) simulation program even for a C64.

author: hfleming
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 08, 2025, 09:49:36 pm
content: PSPICE (or some variant of it, written in FORTRAN) and for RF work, there was another package available (ARRL radio designer, or something like that) before it got taken over by some other software company, and became too expensive to buy for commin mortals. Don’t even ask that question about PCB-layout software, lol…

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 08, 2025, 09:56:18 pm
content: I ran the CAD lab at my university in 1984 and 1985 and we ran PC Spice (I've fairly certain of the name) on the early IBM PCs that used 8088 CPUs and 640k of memory and dual floppy drives. I think that 512k of memory was the minimum that it would run on. I think that we also had Spice on the mainframe computer but I only used it a couple of times.I personally used the Circuit Analysis ROM in the HP-41 calculator most of the time.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 08, 2025, 10:03:48 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on August 03, 2025, 06:10:21 pmLOL! I remember when Lotus 1-2-3 was the same way. They burned a hole in the disk with a laser and it had to be on a specific track and a specific sector so you couldn't just copy the disk and make the copy usable. In about 1986 the US Government made a big deal about not buying any kind of software that was copy protected so Lotus finally relented and removed the CP, I THINK in version 2.01.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 09, 2025, 12:16:26 am
content: Quote from: TimFox on August 08, 2025, 09:24:46 pmI may still have my notes from when I patched it. I could maybe show the exact section of source code. Maybe even fire up PSPICE 1.0 lol....First few minutes talking about my history with SPICE...

author: Jerrery
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 13, 2025, 04:14:14 pm
content: Our lab's senior professor recalled using a stripped-down SPICE on Commodore 64 in the 80s - limited to 10 nodes max. I'm using LTspice for coursework now, can't imagine running simulations on 4MHz CPUs...