Benefits of Spaceball?

[NorthwesternDesign]

Some of my coworkers recommend that I get a spaceball. Its been years since I have tried one and I never could get the hang of it. One slight bump and my view goes haywire. I have recently been doing some web review meetings with my screen being the center of attention. Others involved in the meeting ask me to zoom in here or there, rotate it around, etc.... I wouldn't normally have this much trouble, but each time I selected my rotate point, it would pick some other point that I did not want. Would a spaceball help in this case? I might be willing to try it again, but I would like to hear what other users have experienced.

 

[JohnRBaker]

At our location (at the time I was working for a diversified British manufacturing company at their American division in Saginaw, MI) we started out with 3 stations, one for Food Machinery (where I worked), one for Chemical Machinery and one for Manufacturing (they were actually responisble for the day-to-day operation of the system). All told, we had perhaps 150 engineers, designers, draftsmen, NC programmers working for our company at the time who potentially could have benefited from using the system although we started out with just 6 people going to training in California.

In the next 3 years (I left the company to join the UG organization in 1980) we expanded the original system to 6 stations and added a second system (in those days you had a central CPU with serially connected terminals) which had 5 stations for a total of 11 at our facility (in the UK they had another 4 systems at various locations with something like 32 stations, making our corporation at the time the largest user of Unigraphics in the world).

As for the number of people using the system, those of us who used it on a regular basis worked one of two shifts and all told I think we had trained maybe 25 or 26 people total at the Saginaw location. Of that number, maybe 5 of us would be what you would call an Engineer (degreed or with your PE, which I was both), something like 5 NC programmers and the rest designers and draftsmen.

As you can imagine, we felt like pioneers, but it was a great experience and of course this led to my changing my career direction since, as they say, I had a chance to 'get in at ground floor' and decided to move from the user to the provider side of the equation and I've never looked back.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Dave K]

John, any chance that your "museum" will get back online? the link isn't working for me.

-Dave

NX 5.0.6.3mp7

 

[JohnRBaker]

PLM World recently redesigned their website and they've promised to hook-up the museum again but I don't for sure when that will be. In the mean time, there's a really old link which seems to still work although it tends to be slow at times so I suspect that all it's doing being redirected to where files are on the new site even though there is not a direct link for it under the .org domain. So if you're interested, it still can be found at (note the .com domain):

http://www.plmworld.com/museum/

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Dave K]

Thanks John. I'm still using the orange trimmed Mosler MT900 mouse pad!!

-Dave

NX 5.0.6.3mp7

 

[jerry1423]

I kinda miss the PFK keys. My fingers could really fly on them.
I think I still know the order of some of the commands
I believe 11-2-2-1 was trim to a curve
but when they added the ability to trim to a point
it got changed to 11-2-2-1-2

 

[JohnRBaker]

For those of you who, unlike Jerry and I, have never experienced what a Menu-driven user-interface was like or how you interacted with the software using a PFK, here's a link to part of a document which we would give prospective customers (when we couldn't do an actual demo) to show them how the Unigraphics interface worked:

http://www.plmworld.com/museum/hall/UGI_exercise_1.htm

Note that this document was from the early 80's. Also note that I created the 3D models which you see in figures 17 and 18. And these were all wireframe models, no surfaces or solids, and the 'hidden-line-removed' view in figure 17 was done by manually performing view-dependent edits of the 3D wireframe entities (BTW, I've still got the plastic part it was based on).

And to give you a better idea of what it was like working with models like this, here are before and after images of this same model (remember, this model consists of only lines, arcs and a few splines):

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.com/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.