Talk:Autotrax

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Some more history bits to be sorted out

The early history of this program and the various incarnations (Protel PCB, Tango PCB, Autotrax, EasyTrax, etc.) needs to be sorted out in better details.

Some known versions (very incomplete):

Protel PCB in 1985
HST/Protel-PCB Layout System V3.03 in 1987
HST/Protel PCB Edit 3.12 in 1987
ACCEL Tango PCB (first version in October 1986)
ACCEL Tango PCB 3.12 in 1987
Autotrax 1.0 in 1988 (with PCB File 4 format)
Autotrax 1.61 (last version for download at Altium)
EasyTrax 2.06 (with PCB File 5 format) (last version for download at Altium)

These links may help as well:

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:39, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Autotrax citation

Hi Matthiaspaul,

I noticed that you reverted one of my edits, and would like to explain the rationale behind the original edit and ask for your rationale / suggestions.

While this does apparently look like a full citation of a real source, there are multiple problems with it:

It's apparently citing a book, but surely this is not a book? I was unable to find records of such a book anywhere. WorldCat has no record of it. It looks more like an RFC but I wasn't able to find anything like that either.
The "quote" part is only part-quote, but most of it is just details about the publication and company. This clearly violates Wikipedia guidelines, but even in terms of common sense, it's really distracting and unclear.
The quote itself doesn't look like anything that would appear in a publication of this type. Maybe I'm wrong about the type (see point 1), but it seems more like a summary on the first page (which might incidentally include all of those details from poin 2), but it's hard to believe that it's a quote from inside the published work. Speaking of which,
If this is anything like a book (maybe an internal booklet?), the citation is much less useful if it doesn't specify the page(s) where the quote appears.

Is this source something you know about? Do you have access to it? If so, can you format the citation accordingly? Otherwise I suggest we ask for input from other editors and delete the citation if there isn't any.

—Ynhockey ^(Talk) 21:12, 11 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Ynhockey. Thank you for giving your rationale for the removal with which, however, I disagree, hence my revert. The reference directly supports some specific facts/statements in the article (company and product names, versions, locations, dates) and puts them in context. I think, it is historically relevant.

As (meanwhile) stated in the reference, this citation is in fact from the original professionally printed reference manual (in its original 3-ring binder) of Tango-PCB 3 for DOS from 1986/1987. I happen to (still) own a copy of it (but might need to part with it in the near future for space reasons). The chapters are numbered chapter-wise - in total I would consider the publication to be about 100 pages thick (but I haven't counted them).

The quote consists of 1:1 excerpts from the front matter/intro page (without a page number), with some irrelevant bits and the formatting replaced by ellipses to fit it into reference format (which does not allow for the original formatting to be included). This is perfectly fine by our citation guidelines.

If you look at the article history, until recently it had lots of information mixed up, that's why I decided to correct some facts and add this reference to clear things up. As little information regarding the early history of the product and involved companies (Protel (now Altium), HST, ACCEL) appears to have survived from those old times to this day, I not only provided the reference, but also quoted from it. While it might be debatable to include also a (long defunct) telephone number, I tried to provide full information to establish context as much as possible and to aid further research. (Telephone numbers are search patterns and therefore might help to locate other historical documents.)

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:32, 11 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]