Talk:Applicon

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Tablet stroke recognition was a multi-user problem. An individual could be proficient at the symbols they made and used frequently, but it was less valuable when the strokes to be used were made by someone else. Of the variety and implementations of interfaces I've used, the Applicon tablet strokes are near the bottom of the list for reliability and speed of input.

Tablet stroke recognition was based on normalizing entire strokes and counting crossings on a 3X3 grid. This meant that certain symbols where the crossings occurred near intersections could lead to mistaken creation and unexpected recognition. The symbols shipped with the system had a large number of definitions for some macros in order to increase the chance of acceptance. Sometimes, though, a user defined symbol would be quite close to a supplied one, resulting in unexpected execution.

The main flaw of the Applicon tablet stroke system was that it was not possible to play symbols back from their 'recognized' form. Without a drawing as guidance for the symbol, it was not possible to avoid these overlaps in recognition. Any scribble could cause some symbol to be recognized and its related macro to be executed, without a warning against potential disaster - such as converting an entire assembly from inches to metric, without knowing the actual symbol, nor being able to identify all the changes made to the database.

The most frequently used stroke, beyond the trivial, was the mass-random swirl. This was done as there was no way to interrupt a tablet stroke and no one wanted to chance picking one at random. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.238.134.84 (talk) 18:31, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't recall any cooperative relationship between Applicon and PTC. I was involved in benchmarking a replacement for the collection of CAD tools our company had - Applicon, Computervision, Mechanical Advantage, Unigraphics, and a Catia-workalike - that had collected. We had a presentation from Applicon where I was asked what features I was looking for, and I mentioned that I liked the work that PTC had done so far with Pro/Engineer. The Applicon AE was unhappy and the Sales rep mentioned ~ 'We've heard that from other customers.' The idea there was any relation between the two beyond animosity is unlikely.

On the Applicon side, Schlumberger took Applicon (CAD) and another Schlumberger-held CAM company and tried to force them to make a coherent CAD/CAM product. Each company was OK but, without a common basis, the two segments fought each other for control and resources, to the detriment of both. This information came from talks with the CAD-side reps. See http://www.cadhistory.net/chapters/07_Applicon.pdf for supporting documentation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.238.134.84 (talk) 18:58, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm guessing the misinformation regarding PTC was due to the fact that PTC Founder Sam Geisberg used to work at Applicon. But Applicon itself lasted about ten years past this time frame. As it states in another part of the article, Applicon was purchased by Unigraphics Solutions (now Siemens PLM Solutions) in 1999. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sickingm (talk • contribs) 20:35, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Gary Hornbuckle was co-founder and first president.

Gary Hornbuckle was a co-founder and was President of Applicon until Donald W. Feddersen replace him and the firm was sold to Schlumberger. Hornbuckle received a Ph. D. from UC Berkeley and later did work at MIT's Lincoln Labs. I believe that Applicon sprang from his work on Project "GENIE" at Berkeley which included a tablet user interface with pattern recognition.

Here is a reference to one of his publications:

Hornbuckle, G.D. (1967). The computer graphics user/machine interface, IEEE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, 8(1), 17 - 20.

68.159.67.90 20:40, 14 April 2007 (UTC)H.E. Hall

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Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Applicon/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Having been at DEC from 1969 to 1981, I assure you Applicon did not create the first multi-user DEC operating system. That was RSTS-11 (Resource Sharing Time Sharing)and was created for use in the educational marketplace. Euonymous (talk) 22:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Last edited at 22:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 08:06, 29 April 2016 (UTC)