Autodesk Artifacts Need a Better Home Than My Storage

30 years is a long time to accumulate stuff.

Update March 23 , 2026 Group 1 is posted! https://btl-blog.com/2026/03/23/group-1-is-live-how-to-make-an-offer-on-early-autodesk-memorabilia/

Update March 22, 2026

Group 1 of memorabilia going live in the next 24 hours. It’s a heavier effort than expected.

Some of it found me. Boxes left at my door or copy room by people cleaning out their desks. The Autodesk Technical library in San Rafael shuttered and the staff just gave everything away rather than watch it get tossed, and somehow a good chunk of it ended up with me. Readers of this blog mailed things over the years because they figured I’d take care of it.

I have. But I’m not the right final destination for this stuff anymore.

What I have is the first issues of early Cadalyst and CADENCE magazines from when those were the only places CAD people talked to each other. One issue described the formation of NAAUG North American AutoCAD Users Group that became what we know today as AUGI.

Printed AutoCAD manuals from the beginning. Floppy disks, including the AutoCAD-86 first release. Just to be clear, I’m not selling software licenses, there’s nothing to license, these are physical objects. Magnetic plastic. The kind you hold and feel the weight of history in your hands a little or place on your office wall.

And the infamous firehose nozzle. The actual physical nozzle. If you’ve spent any time with early AutoCAD you’ve seen it in the 2D sample drawings, and later it became the assembly sample for Autodesk Inventor in 3D. That nozzle is not a reproduction, not a print, not a scan. It’s the thing itself. One of a kind as far as I can tell, and I’ve been around long enough to have a pretty good idea.

Think about what Autodesk actually is for a moment. A scrappy startup that launched out of Sausalito in 1982 with a handful of people who believed personal computers could do something that had never been done before: put professional design tools in the hands of anyone with a PC. Before AutoCAD, CAD systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and lived in the back rooms of aerospace companies and defense contractors. Autodesk blew that open. Over the next 4 decades the company grew into the largest and most enduring design software company in the world, reshaping how engineers design bridges, how architects draw buildings, how manufacturers build products, how filmmakers create worlds. The skylines you see, the cars you drive, the infrastructure you depend on every day, enormous amounts of it passed through Autodesk software at some point. That story started with a floppy disk and a sample drawing of a firehose nozzle.

Here’s what bothers me about all of this sitting in boxes: Autodesk has never been a company that liked looking back. I understand the instinct to push forward, but I watched it go too far. At one point a CEO told employees to get rid of the old stuff entirely. There were internal pushes to tamp down the annual celebrations of Autodesk’s founding and early release milestones. I was told more than once, as an employee, to dial it back. The thinking was that Autodesk didn’t want to be known as the AutoCAD company anymore.

I never bought that framing and I still don’t.

Adobe celebrates its history. SolidWorks celebrates its history. Both are forward-looking companies that also understand where they came from. There’s no contradiction there. The way you get customers, partners, and potential investors to believe in your vision for the next 10 years is to show them everything you actually delivered over the last 40. That’s the proof. Mock the past and you’re mocking the foundation you’re standing on.

I always said: if you want people to believe how much things can change for the better in the next decade, just show them what the last four decades actually produced. The evidence is overwhelming. The history makes the case better than any roadmap slide ever could.

So these artifacts matter. Not just as nostalgia, but as proof of what was built, how it started, and why it mattered. Autodesk doesn’t have most of this anymore. What survived in private hands is part of the actual record now. You may never have another opportunity to own a true piece of CAD history. Frame it on your wall. Put it in a case. Donate it to an institution that will treat it right. Whatever you do with it, it deserves better than a garage shelf.

I’m running a two-week sealed offer window. Individual pieces or the full lot, your call. I’ll weigh the offer amount and the story behind it equally. Where this ends up matters to me. It is better to do it this way that to have both of us scammed by eBay fees.

Thank you!

Cheers

-Shaan