A HUGE Thank You to John, Duff, and Dan for giving us Autodesk and AutoCAD. For many of us it not only changed an industry but also changed many lives,
While there was a product named Microcad purchased by Autodesk before AutoCAD, it did not become AutoCAD although some incorrectly thought it did.
Cheers,
Shaan
Isn’t it the program Interact that was used to build the first version of AutoCAD?
At least the recent press release from The CAD Society gives Mike Riddle credit for the architectural basis for the earliest versions of AutoCAD.
http://www.cadsociety.org/releases/40108_riddle.html
Mike’s program may have sparked the idea for John, but it was not AutoCAD. Mike’s product was a crude assembly language based program for the Marinchip platform with very little functionality.
AutoCAD was written in C language and by release had many more features and ran on the PC platforms. I was just pointing out the common rumour that AutoCAD was another product just renamed was not true. Mike when working for Autodesk actually worked on Duff’s former product AutoDESK, not AutoCAD.
While Mike Riddle may have sparked an idea, it rethought, refined, and evolved by others into the product we know as AutoCAD, Mike did not write AutoCAD. John, Duff, and Dan rightfully deserve the full recognition for all things that became Autodesk and AutoCAD as without them there would be no AutoCAD or Autodesk or the major changes to the design world.
Autodesk was responsible for the shift from the drafting board pencils and expensive mainframe CAD systems to the affordable PC platform and many innovations.
Regards,
Shaan
My understanding from reading John Walker’s The Autodesk File is this:
Autodesk bought Microcad from Mike Riddle, made the decision to port it to C, did so, and then developed it extensively, still under the name Microcad. The name was changed in code from Microcad to AutoCAD on 10 October 1982, so maybe that’s another significant birthday to remember.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_14.html#SECTION00140000000000000000
Because of the above, it’s legitimate to say that Microcad was AutoCAD. However, because there would have been no code in common between Mike Riddle’s Assembler Microcad and Autodesk’s C Microcad/AutoCAD, it’s equally legitimate to say that Mike Riddle’s Microcad was not AutoCAD.
Steve,
I dug deeper on the topic than the Autodesk File as that left too many questions for me. I discussed this topic at length with founders including in person with John Walker last year.
Cheers,
Shaan -> on sabbatical until June 🙂