> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world

So many things come to mind with that one sentence, it's mesmerizing. I don't have a lot of direct exposure to Oracle, but I remember grief with Adobe and Autodesk products dating back to the 80s.

My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at home. They used Aldus (eventually Adobe) PageMaker to design their catalogues. Both were ridiculously expensive large applications with a pretty solid lock on their respective industries. For the kind of catalogues they printed, they were required to provide the files in some format only PageMaker could produce and for their plays -- .DWG files.

I'm not sure how AutoCAD was actually licensed[0]. But much like Adobe's products, AutoCAD was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500 and because a price tag like that means "a lot of people will pirate it", they required attaching a special device to the parallel port (a "License Dongle") in order to start the application. Before I was old enough to "step in and solve the problem", my Dad would just take the dongle home with him on the weekends.

Generally speaking I don't think a single piece of software generated more profanity in my home than AutoCAD did. It started when he brought it home the first time. He'd dropped $4,000 on an 8088 clone (built by a local shop) with a 10MB hard drive. We lacked the free space and he'd come home with a full height 20MB drive. I remember my Dad with a screwdriver trying to get the old drive out / new drive into this tight, steel case[1] about every 2-4 minutes -- yelling some brief 4-letter word-combo. I don't remember what it was that I needed in the office at that moment but my mom intercepted me on my way and said "you'll want to stay out of there for a little bit."[2]

I remember he had to install/remove the drive twice because he had forgotten to install the 8087 co-processor before he put the drive back in.

The dongle was a source of constant grief. In this era, the parallel port was almost always used for printing. The dongle had a pass-through. It sometimes let you print when the pass-through was used but for whatever reason, it failed enough that it was often removed to print. The license dongle remained unplugged most of the time because the computer was used to print things more than it was used to draft things. Worse, I think this was one of two license dongles that was required by software my Dad used. These dongles appeared to be designed to fail -- kind of makes sense if their license model really is "per seat/per user" -- maybe they wanted it to fail if it's traded between machines too frequently? But suffice it to say, it broke. Around this time, thankfully, I'd discovered BBSes and software cracking. I fixed the problem and we lost the dongle.

[0] I'm going to guess that it was actually "per install/per user" and forgive the remainder of the details ... I'm going from poorly Google-enhanced memory from when I was under age ten. Anecdotally, my Dad and all of the businesses that he worked with -- outside of "taking home a dongle" -- were all properly licensed despite the common wisdom at the time being "small shops are mostly pirates."

[1] Google image search 8088 clone and look for the ones with the two 5.12" floppies, beige plastic front, all metal otherwise. We had two 5.12" floppies in the right full height drive slot and one MFM full-height HDD in the left.

[2] I'm making my Dad sound like an angry hot-head -- in reality, he was never like this except for the handful of times he had to fight with this box. Had I walked into the office, my Dad probably would have been embarrassed ... my mom was simply trying to keep me out of his hair while he was stressed out.