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Ah the specter of EDI!

I first encountered Electronic Data Interchange in the early 90's. The small shop I worked for at the time had no idea and just wanted to make the parts they quoted and send them when done.

The EDI request came in a box, with external modem, a paper with phone number and directions and then a smaller box with PROGRESS database software for MSDOS in side and a handful of disks containing the EDI system.

Good lord that was painful! I just plowed through it and all that pain completed a check box at Honeywell, who then sent us jobs electronically!

Yes, via FTP.

The CAD they were sending was Computer Vision and it was a full on solid model representation! At the time we were running CAD from the early enlightenment, CADKEY 3.5 for MSDOS!

Our best micro computer lacked the storage to handle the uncompressed file, which arrived on another handful of floppies that formed a multi part. Zip file, which uncompressed totaled about 40 megabytes and change! Entire systems only had 20!

The CAD system failed to translate the data too. 16bit pointers lacked the range needed. They had me fetch a patch a day or two later and it took a few hours to do.

300 kilobytes of wireframe CAD, and the parts we made were basically 5 percent of that data!

Crazy times!



I remember the nightmare days where I refer to my 3-inch bound EDI specs all the time while implementing EDI validation


Ugh! Not sure how big ours was, but it was big enough to feel your comment.




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