LTspice, suffers from being a dammed good and fast simulator.

Simulation is basically a large matrix solving procedure, and the guys who wrote and maintain LTspice certainly know there stuff.

A lot of people and companies have huge investment in LTspice

BUT :

LTspices interface / GUI was "hand" crafted at the beginning, way back when, before the windows conventions came along.

And there is the paradox.

Lots of people and companies do great stuff with lots of LTspice,

Personally, being an infrequent user of LTSpice, its interface frustrates me every time. At a LTSpice conferences back 20 years ago, the GUI was a hot topic.

How do they "switch" to a new "windows standard" interface ?

Back in the distant past, there was WordPerfect, which was the number 1 by a long way word processor.
When MS Word came along, it even had a mode to make the GUI Wordperfect compatible.

Back in the distant past, there was a spread sheet program called Lotus 1-2-3 , it was by far and away the worlds #1.
when MS Excel first came out, it even had a Lotus compatible mode,

Neither of them could drop there existing users, but MS came along and was good enough and cheaper,

Will LTspice go the same way ?

At the price of LTspice, i.e. zero, I doubt it any time soon,

 

Even more difficult than that: ballistic trajectories. An iterative process involving partial derivatives.
Done by hand, assisted with logarithmic and trig tables. Remember those tables?

That was the reason ENIAC's primary use was calculating artillery tables.

 

I would sure hate to plot the transfer function of 6th Order Chebyshev filter by hand with just a scientific calculator.

In Scilab it took 4 lines. Almost as good as LTspice with a behavioral Voltage source and a Laplace Transform: two components and a GND symbol.

 

Bingo and yet guys were doing it.

Ron

Yeah. when a graduate engineer worked for $1.50/hr. People were a great deal cheaper than machines. Don't forget the ladies who excelled at orbital calculations.

 

Yeah. when a graduate engineer worked for $1.50/hr. People were a great deal cheaper than machines. Don't forget the ladies who excelled at orbital calculations.

There is some real good reading in all of that. Katherine Johnson and others come to mind. Hidden Figures was the movie. These woman were relentless in that they even slept math and numbers. My head hurts after a few hours at best. Maybe we had the right stuff but they were the great stuff.

Ron

 

My head hurts after a few hours at best. Maybe we had the right stuff but they were the great stuff.

Ron

Not detracting their activity at all but their work was exactly that: doing calculation themselves. Weren't they called in fact "computers"?

 

Not detracting their activity at all but their work was exactly that: doing calculation themselves. Weren't they called in fact "computers"?

Yes, they were hired to crunch numbers and they went about that really well. So yes, they were just doing their jobs but they were good and tenacious. I give them credit for that. I also give credit to a street sweeper or janitor who does what they do really well.

Ron

 

Yes, they were hired to crunch numbers and they went about that really well. So yes, they were just doing their jobs but they were good and tenacious. I give them credit for that. I also give credit to a street sweeper or janitor who does what they do really well.

Ron

Where did they get their preparation for that job? University?

 

Where did they get their preparation for that job? University?

She did go to college, but she also displayed great skill in school. Here is her quite extraordinary biography.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

 

She did go to college, but she also displayed great skill in school. Here is her quite extraordinary biography.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

Some people just have this ability when it comes to math. I did OK but always had to work at it. My granddaughter has always been in Honors Math, currently a sophomore. We have talked about it and she can't explain why but it just seems to come to her. Neither of her parents have the ability. She just does it. Beats the hell out of me and she is honors across the board but the math always surprised me. Her cousin, 6 months younger also a sophomore is more like myself, he "gets it" but needs to work at it. Katherine Johnson was just one of those people. Most of them can't even explain the ability or gift, whatever we choose to call it.

Ron

 

She did go to college, but she also displayed great skill in school. Here is her quite extraordinary biography.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

Gracias PB!
Obviously she was far from posting something like this

 

Gracias PB!
Obviously she was far from posting something like this

Don't feel bad, I've come across a couple of mind benders in the last couple of days exploring the theory behind Chebyshev filters.

 

However, when I am in work, we are still often stuck with the same packages, purely because there doesn't seem to be anything nicer out there.

The last company I worked at used an in-house circuit simulator. No commercial program was considered good enough.

 

I was fell in love with LT-Spice around 2002, so I feel it very handy, however library import isnt so nice at all. But the basic reason WHY ir is greediness of the big semiconductor firs hiding the physical parameters let no-one may steel their circuits. Because the LT Spice MAY be used for steeling the design. But P-Spice not, therefore the P-Spice is so expensive.