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Some Notes about NASTRAN
#1
These are some notes about NASTRAN, which may help to shed light about the state of NASTRAN-95:
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The FTC settlement with MSC resulted in the sale of UAI NASTRAN to a competitor. It wasn't made public. As I recall SDRC was the purchaser. They eventually were taken over by Siemens and UAI Nastran is part of their engineering software offering. The original NASA NASTRAN is still available but I don't know the details about that. 

The original Nastran was written in a subset of FORTRAN IV that would compile on IBM, CDC and Univac machines. Starting around 1979 <name omitted> led a project to put NASA Nastran on the Digital Equipment VAX computers running VMS. MSC complained about our doing what they had shown little interest in doing. MSC then did an updated version themselves that ran on VAX and other brands with FORTRAN 77 compilers. 

Meanwhile UAI also migrated their version to the VAX and other platforms including PCs running Windows. I provided the VAX computer UAI used for a lot of their debugging. You may recall that we had a rather rocky start with UAI Nastran but I helped them in various ways to use our VAX via a phone dial up connection (1200 baud!). Given the three hour difference in California time, the arrangement worked fairly well as they used our VAX after we went home. Eventually UAI's version worked as well as MSC's did. As you know, UAI had better sub structuring. Eventually MSC took over UAI and then CSA for good measure. Somebody (not us) sicced the FTC on them and that eventually led to the anti-trust trial that almost happened. The day before the trial, MSC folded and negotiated the settlement that led ultimately to the Siemens version.
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Some Notes about NASTRAN - by Admin - 01-15-2020, 08:09 PM
RE: Some Notes about NASTRAN - by Admin - 01-20-2020, 06:48 AM

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