On a second note my research about this issue turned up a similar situation where someone solved another problem stating that the program was expecting much smaller hard drives than today's drives and it somehow generated the "not enough memory" message. Solution was to put the program on a small partition. Want to weigh in on the viability of that undertaking??
I decided to play around some more before I headed in the direction of a smaller partition.
It's good you didn't waste more time doing that. It's just the usual "somebody says this worked for them" even though if you really stop to think about it
at all, you realize it makes
no sense whatsoever. It's far more likely that while he/she/they changed the partition size they reinstalled the software and fixed whatever the real issue was.
Along with the Claris CAD software there was a second program called Claris Graphics Translator which I had tried to open previously and got the same not-enough memory message but in the Get Info you could change the min and preferred memory values…
With this additional info which you didn't previously mention, I can now explain exactly what happened with 99% certainty. The CAD app uses the Translator app as a utility to both enable it to open "foreign" documents by translating their format
and save drawings in foreign formats all so you can share docs and work product with others. (AutoCAD, anyone?)
So why, you ask, would it need to resort to using Translator to open a previous CAD doc that I saved myself? Probably because you saved the work in a different version of Claris CAD and Translator is also used to smooth out any little differences. More than one developer used outboard utilities like this back in the day when apps like this were distributed on copy-protected CD-ROM. Then,
any upgrade was a big effin' deal but you could spit out app updates and utilities anywhere anytime while keeping the authorization issues locked to the original CD.
But apparently it also adjusted the allocated memory for the Claris CAD program as well and when I tried opening a drawing again in Claris CAD it worked and I have a fully functioning CAD program again.
Ahhh…… but you see you always DID have a functioning CAD app. It launched just fine when you just opened it alone, remember? When you tried to open a
document, the app launched Translator to handle the job. The memory error you were getting was
coming from Translator running alongside under CAD. You either didn't notice that OR Claris didn't bother to tell you which one was short of memory in the message.
However, THAT was very likely clearly explained in the…wait for it……… MANUAL…… that thick book you would have had open next to you for a
long time until you learned all of the ins and outs of Claris CAD (which was no small task) and would have had on the shelf to refer to when this shit happened.
The lesson here is simply: When you go for help online for obsolete hardware and/or software, describe
everything down to the smallest detail. Information is power.