Between the Lines

Happy 41st Birthday Autodesk

Today, I celebrate and acknowledge the 41st anniversary of Autodesk's founding on January 30, 1982. Over the past 41 years, Autodesk has established itself as a leader in the design and engineering software industry, and has played a significant role in shaping the way professionals in architecture, engineering, construction, and media and entertainment industries work. Read more →

Autodesk Community Conversations for January & February 2022

Join us for one of the new Autodesk Community Conversations! "Autodesk Turns 40 Years Young" January 28th "Dynamo inside a Host" February 3rd "AutoCAD Electrical with Tifani and Tiffany" February 10th https://autode.sk/3qGKTjd Read more →

40 Years Old - Lets have Some Fun and Tell Stories

No, it is not me turning 40... Autodesk turns 40 years young on January 30, 2022 after being founded January 30th, 1982. To celebrate this momentous occasion the Autodesk Community will be sharing some of your stories and memorabilia over the years. There are very few technology companies that have reached the 40 year mark. We want you to be involved and to hear your stories and see images. Share your story of AutoCAD or Autodesk products or just old... Read more →

Between the Lines is 18 Years Old on Saturday

On August 21, 2003, this blog started thanks to the encouragement of two Autodesk colleagues Bill Johnston and Eric Wright. I was one of the top posting members in the Autodesk Discussion Forums on my own time, and at times answered the same plotting question week after week. I was told blogs might be a great platform to post a solution share the link when asked the questions again as well the posts would be found easily by others on... Read more →

Throwback Thursday- What a Long Strange Trip It's Been

Fun historical Autodesk fact. The singer/guitarist for the band Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia once visited an Autodesk office. Read more →

Fun Finds

In packing my house up to move, I am going through boxes of my technology and Autodesk history items and having a blast remembering all the tech and fun times. There is a slew of my phones and PDA, from the Palm to the super teeny iPhone 5s. The Blackberry with the missing scroll ball saved my life many years ago while in my shirt pocket during a gas fireplace explosion, and my Blackberry was taking the shard of glass... Read more →

Autodesk Turns 39

In Marin County, California, a small group of people got together January 30, 1982 and formed Autodesk. As founder John Walker stated “the game has changed.” Today marks the 39th birthday of Autodesk. Autodesk’s Flying founders ”Autodesk Founders. They didn't walk on water, but they could fly pretty well.” The Autodesk flying founders from left to right: Rudolf Künzli, Mike Ford, Dan Drake, Mauri Laitinen, Greg Lutz, David Kalish, Lars Moureau, Richard Handyside,Kern Sibbald, Hal Royaltey, Duff Kurland, John Walker,... Read more →

Throwback Thursday TBT – Simply The Best

Who knew in the boxes of 38 years of Autodesk history that I have that we could connect Tina Turner and her hit song Simply The Best with Autodesk the software company. I received this 45rpm vinyl record from Dietmar Rudolph some years ago along with other Autodesk memorabilia. It is unique and appears to be to commemorate some event in Germany. It may be unique and odd, but not the most unique and odd Autodesk memorabilia in my collection.... Read more →

Throwback Thursday – AutoCAD-80 version 1.2 Circa 1982

I may have found someone with the oldest AutoCAD release software outside of Autodesk. Of course internally we had early 1.0 alphas, betas, and development copies that were never released. In fact AutoCAD-80 and AutoCAD-86 version 1.0 was never commercially released. I found a early AutoCAD customer with AutoCAD-80 version 1.2 from 1982 for the CP/M operating system on an 8” floppy disk. I recognize many may be younger than this floppy disk, and may not have ever seen one... Read more →

Throwback Thursday - Space Shuttle

AutoCAD 1.4 circa 1984/85 and the Space Shuttle drawing by Autodesk founder John Walker. This is one of the earliest known DWG sample files used to show AutoCAD-86. I captured this on a retro 286/287 that I run in my home office for geeky fun. Update: Here is the AutoCAD 1.x sample file, one of the earliest sample files from 1984. Download SHUTTLE.DWG (7.1K) -Shaan Read more →

Throwback Thursday - The Very First AutoCAD Logo from 1982

Throwback Thursday – Mining Data from Old AutoCAD Floppies

If you read the word “Floppies” and scratched your head, you might be less than 30 years old and never seen what we had to work with to store data and install products back in the early days. There were 3.25, 5, and 10” floppies back in the early AutoCAD days and platforms like DEC, Zenith, Victor, Sun, and good ol’ IBM DOS. I grabbed some of my AutoCAD 2.x and earlier floppies and am using my native retro cad... Read more →

Throwback Thursday - The Solar System Drawn to Scale in AutoCAD DWG - Scale is Everything

Take a trip to the Universe to 1:1 scale in AutoCAD. https://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2018/02/the-solar-system-drawn-to-scale-in-autocad-dwg-scale-accuracy-is-everything.html Read more →

AutoCAD Release History – 35 Releases and Counting

AutoCAD Release History (https://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/autocad-release-history.html) AutoCAD 1.0 December 1982 (Release 1) AutoCAD 1.2 April 1983 (Release 2) AutoCAD 1.3 August 1983 (Release 3) AutoCAD 1.4 October 1983 (Release 4) AutoCAD 2.0 October 1984 (Release 5) AutoCAD 2.1 May 1985 (Release 6) AutoCAD 2.5 June 1986 (Release 7) AutoCAD 2.6 April 1987 (Release 8) AutoCAD R9 September 1987 codename White Album (Release 9) AutoCAD R10 October 1988 codename Abbey Road (Release 10) AutoCAD R11 October 1990 codename Let it Be (Release 11)... Read more →

Throwback Thursday – 3ds Max Flashback

I have been using 3DS Max since release 1.0 and 3D Studio for DOS before that where we had the Shaper, the Lofter, and that other mode I always forget when animation was really hard and rendering frames took hours and hours to only find out you messed up and need to start over especially since your viewports didn't have materials applied real-time like todays 3ds max. Today I had a great flashback of all the releases by Ian Failes... Read more →

Solar System Drawn to Scale in AutoCAD DWG

An oldie but a goodie! Back in AutoCAD version 2.18 (circa 1985), Autodesk placed a sample drawing with AutoCAD named the Solar.DWG to demonstrate the precision of AutoCAD back in the early eighties. AutoCAD was based used 64bit floating point precision and the most accurate back then. With this Solar DWG you can see our solar system in 1:1 scale in kilometer units. This would not be a good DWG to plot/print 1:1 full scale. You can zoom all the... Read more →

Congratulations Old Timers

At 22 years with Autodesk, many consider me an “old timer”, but I'm really not compared to others at Autodesk. Internally back in the day Autodesk employees referred to themselves as “deskers”, and “old timers” was a term of respect for those with a 20 year gold badge or more. Last week at the One Team Conference, we celebrated 35 years for Simon Jones of GCD (Autodesk Global Consulting Delivery). Simon has accomplished so much for AEC at Autodesk and... Read more →

Learn AutoCAD Cassette from 1986

In a blast from the past I took the infamous cassette tape in my Autodesk historical collection and purchased a cassette tape to MP3 converter to see if the 34 year old cassette had anything good on it after all this time, and who was the voice on the tape. The cassette was still good! Low and behold it had someone I had not expected, Autodesk founder John walker narrating the 30 minute cassette tape and at the end talking about product support and bug reporting. Upon listening I was transported magically back to 1986. Read more →

Throwback Thursday – Autodesk CAD Camera

Here is a very rare one from my Autodesk historic collection. CAD Cameras 1.0 was a utility to convert paper drawings “digitizing to AutoCAD using a flatbed or fixed-distance scanner in 1985. I actually have the entire package with the 5.25” floppy disk. Perhaps the floppy disks have good data to run it on an old PC system, but most likely not as they are 35 year old magnetic floppies and time and electronic interference are not kind to the... Read more →

Happy 38th Birthday Autodesk

Autodesk was founded on January 30th, 1982. Today marks the 38th birthday of Autodesk becoming a legal U.S. corporation. Read more →

Throwback Thursday – How to Get Started in AutoCAD Circa 1986

This book is about 8 pages making the irony not lost on me. Learn AutoCAD Without Reading the Manual. Here is the tough AutoCAD History trivia question: Who is Kelvin R. Throop, the author of this book? Read more →

AutoCAD 1.4 with RetroCAD

Retro AutoCAD is so very cool to see. Having personally over the years cultivated and documented a collection of historical Autodesk software, events, images, and memorabilia (Autodesk History Gallery), it was a pleasure to find someone else that shares this love of old design tools. It is amazing to see how far things have come and evolved or changed in the past 37’ish years and then thinking what it might look like 10-37 years from today. I have a working... Read more →

Throwback Thursday

I wanted to share a few more images of items in my Autodesk historical collection. This 5.25” floppy disk was from the very early beginning of Autodesk and AutoCAD. This is the AutoCAD 2.0 demo drawings shown at the 1984 COMDEX event. Read more from Autodesk Founder John Walker about COMDEX 1984 and some of the photos. The AutoCAD R14 demo CR-ROM from 1997 that featured a really geeky customer (yes me). https://youtu.be/fThsTwTNkQc A 1980’s era Autodesk logo pin. Read more →

Throwback Thursday - AutoCAD Helps View Solar Eclipses История по четвергам - AutoCAD для наблюдения за солнечным затмением

While those old 5.25 inch floppies may not be of much help these days other than memorabilia, the Autodesk Moscow office made good use of them as lenses to view a solar eclipse.а первый взгляд, сейчас трудно найти применение 5.25-дюймовым дискетам. Может только как экспонаты в музее! Но сотрудники московского офиса Autodesk нашли им применение для просмотра солнечного затмения. Read more →

Life Before AutoCAD

A funny Throwback Thursday looking at what life was like before we had AutoCAD assisting in drafting and design. 18 Amazing Vintage Photos That Show How Life Before AutoCAD Looked Like https://www.vintag.es/2018/08/life-before-autocad.html Read more →