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It continues to be a mess to this day. Most aerospace manufacturers that used CATIA V4 are still making completed aircraft or parts and components that were des

It continues to be a mess to this day. Most aerospace manufacturers that used CATIA V4 are still making completed aircraft or parts and components that were designed in the 90's with that software. At the OEM I work at, we have one guy that easily spends 80% of his time dealing with legacy V4 models that need to be brought up to CATIA V5. Whenever we get obscure spare parts requests, he has to go exorcise the models out of the V4 mainframe that we still run, massaging them until we can get geometry that's good enough to use for manufacturing purposes. I will never forgive Dassault for the lack of compatibility between V4 and V5.

hef19898 5y ago
If you back before to the time before CAD, it's even worse. An OEM I worked for braught back a couple of retirees to convert the "old" free form drawings (I'm at a complete loss of the technical term here, basically the slight curverture of the fusselage, and doors, was drawn "free-hand" on paper) into usable CAD models Simply because the younger generation of engineers never learned how those free forms drawings worked. That's especially a pain in Aerospace, when 40 year product life cycles meet considwrably shorter software lifecycles. Tgat being said, I'm told there arw still people out yhere maintaibing COBOL, so. I do see parallels to ERP software (something I'm much familiar with). Release changes are a major PITA, switching vendors close to impossible, and people complain evenly about each and every single option and vendor. Until you take the system they know away, that is. As someone stated above, once you understood the underlyong logoc, things become easy. It does require some major brain accrobatics sometimes, so.