So we have from the above history site:
So this is Ansoft, which I thought was the same as AnSof
Ansoft
We need to add some history here, but for now we'll just copy some stuff we grabbed from the Ansoft web site. Ansoft was founded in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1984 by Dr. Zoltan Cendes. At some point they merged with SuperCOMPACT.
And this was a horrible company, now enfolded into HP/Keysight
EEsof, Touchstone and Libra
EESof was a well financed enterprise from the beginning, the brainchild of Chuck Abronson and a former Compact employee, Bill Childs. Their first product was called TOUCHSTONE, introduced in 1983. We don't think the name was an acronym. To the user, it seemed like they had ripped off the entire COMPACT netlist interface, but behind that they had created an entirely new engine (another hardware term unfortunately ripped off by geeks). It must have been very efficient, because it ran fast enough on an IBM-AT PC so that it wasn't too annoying (no doubt you had to spring for the math coprocessor on the PC). It also could run on H-P minicomputers. This quickly got a lot of attention from engineers who were sick of mainframes, where they generally had to play second fiddles to accounting and data processing departments.
New for June 2010: Here's the perspective of someone who was there (thanks!)
I can add a little background to the Touchstone story. I worked at Amplica during the period of time when EEsof was formed. Our president Chuck A. had sold the company to Comsat the year before I joined; Comsat had also bought Compact Software the year before that. One of the Comsat engineers that had worked with the Compact part of the business (Bill Childs) was transferred to Amplica to help develop our amplifier designs. It was Bill who authored Touchstone. He would carry a Compaq portable PC back and forth to work every day (it looked like a sewing machine in its case), and that’s the platform he developed much of the code on. Chuck was the money and business man, he made no technical contributions to the program.
To analyze circuits using TOUCHSTONE, you had to have two display screens for your PC, one for handling the netlist and the other for displaying results. One huge innovation they are credited with is the ability to "tune" the circuit and watch the response move. TOUCHSTONE required a hardware key on the printer port to keep track of the license, making it portable as well. By 1987 EESof's TOUCHSTONE was linked with a crude layout tool (MiCAD), and a version of SPICE. Another cool program they offered was ANACAT, which allowed you to control a Hewlett Packard 8510 network analyzer or the equivalent Wiltron ANA from a PC, and be able to sort data in an acceptable format for reading into TOUCHSTONE. By this time the guys at COMPACT must have soiled themselves with fear for their jobs.
EESof often ran ads that always showed food on top of a computer in a covert but successful effort to promote obesity and chair stains in the industry.
EEsof's TOUCHSTONE product eventually became "Libra" when the harmonic balance analysis was added, which was a truly great piece of software (some MMIC geeks get all misty when you mention it) but a step backward to PC users since it typically ran on a UNIX platform. Most of the physical circuit elements first became perfected on this package. Hewlett Packard had their own CAD software called MDS microwave design microwave (thanks for the correction, John D!). Eventually they bought out EEsof, pink-slipped a bunch of their competitors and over the years abandoned the Libra code (which started as TOUCHSTONE) and came up with an entirely new code stream which is now ADS. ADS is not an improvement in user-friendliness over any of its predecessors, according to a lot of microwave engineers. However, there is hope for this product, we can report that a test copy of the next 2004 release being used by a "Microwaves101 unnamed source" runs much faster, which could indicate that Agilent has finally gotten around to cleaning out all the dead code in the bastard grandson of TOUCHSTONE.
Attention Intel and other politically correct companies... the word "bastard" is not a "swear word", it means illegitimate. Did you know that bastards are a fast growing demographic in the good 'ol diverse USA? Just ask your kids or grandkids how many of their little friends have parents that never married. Maybe someday the IEEE will form an interest group called "Microwave Transactions from Bastards", or MTB for short!
In case you are looking for Mr. Abronson, he's now Chairman of CAP Wireless.
CAP Wireless
capwireless.com
qorvo.com
Multiple Locations:
qorvo.com
Anritsu
anritsu.com
Rhode Schartz, based no in Germany
rohde-schwarz.com
Narda, Santa Margarita CA
nardamiteq.com
Mercury ( is this Wiltron )
mrcy.com
mwrf.com
Wiltron was bought by Anritsu
California Eastern Labs
cel.com
SJG
Tijuana
youtube.com
