An amazing surprise as I walked into the office this morning, Kevin Schneider presented me with the historical original nozzle used in many sample files and demos of AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor over the past 34 years.
AutoCAD 2.6 included a sample drawing of a nozzle that has been one of the iconic sample drawings in AutoCAD release history, known affectionately as “the nozzle.” The creator of the drawing Don Strimbu designed the nozzle in 1983 using a primitive featured AutoCAD running on floppy disks and a slow 8086 computer.
Here is the 2D drawing opened in AutoCAD 2.18.
The same nozzle was used by Mike Geyer to create a 3D assembly in Autodesk Inventor, and was a very popular demo dataset.
I couldn’t wait until Throwback Thursday to share the news of the original nozzle being on my desk. As the unofficial historian of Autodesk, I hope to put this on display for all to see.
Cheers,
Shaan
scan it?
Great stuff Shaan, I have also been collecting Autodesk memorabilia since the late 80s, but this is the pièce de résistance. Brilliant. Dale
It’s far past time to remove that “unofficial” label from your Historian duties!
That drawing has significance in development as well as sales demos. It was part of the DWG compatibility suite and ferreted out a number of bugs. I remember one, fixed at 3:00AM the night before shipping masters, involving entity handles that Greg fixed. When we were building the Software Quality Assurance competency in the mid-to-late 80’s the team of long-timers (at that time) used that drawing as a test drawing in repeatable/documented/automated test cases run 10’s of thousands of times, build after build to make AutoCAD 2.18 through AutoCAD 2002 great (my tenure). Seeing that drawing brings up memories of my team with Valerie, Peter, Kevin, Tim, Barry, Donnell and others working through the night and late night phone calls with Lutz, Lynch, Sibbald, Laitinen, Drake, Kurland, Harris, and other developers to get it right. Thanks for the memories! Thanks Shaan for the flashback!
Somewhere in my files I have the first brochure from when Drake I believe went to Comdex (around 81 or so) with 1.00. (Might not have the dates correct). Anyway, the term CAD was not used anyplace in it – the term was “Picture Perfect Drawing”. Too funny!
Wow, thanks for sharing…quite a walk down memory lane…really enjoyed it!
Wow, I’m super impressed, I mean who knew that Strimbu knew how to draw? That nozzle brings back lots of memories for sure.
I demonstrated and taught so many Autodesk platforms throughout the years they all run together. I started using AutoCAD on version 2.6.2 but already had several years of CV experience.
I enjoyed working with the guys in Sausalito using AutoCAD, then early on with AME solids (yes I was part of the pioneer solids testers) and then going to Novi for Autosurf and working with Buzz’s team once Inventor got rolling.
Carl, speaking of old things… I still have my “Mechanical Desktop Demo Champion” award sitting on my desk. That was like 22 or 23 years ago.
Nice bit of history with that brochure!
Great to hear from you Andrew, and thank you for the nice words and historical flashback.
I could scan it, but I already have an accurate 3D model in Inventor of the nozzle.
Dale,
We will have to compare historical Autodesk memorabilia sometime. I would love digital photos of any old memorabilia to keep record of it.
Cheers
Shaan
R.K.,
I’m not sure there is an official historian hat around. Thanks for the kind words and vote of confidence.
You are very welcome. Its nice people appreciate the bits and bytes from history.
🙂
The Nozzle dude! That’s what we used to call you!
The nozzle and the space shuttle. Iconic.
Was it Peter Barnett that did the space shuttle? A bit of “faking” 3D. 🙂
Ha!
There were two shuttle drawings. One was in 2.18 and done by John Walker. The one you are referring to is the one I think that was in the R12 sample files? I’m not sure who did the one in R12 the 2.5D ISO looking one.
Great to hear from you! You are one of the Autodesk employees that knew me as a customer as well as desker.
-Shaan
what a flashback!