Masters of Technology Happy Hour
Conversations with masters of technology, those who produce it or those who use it.
Masters of Technology Happy Hour
S1 Ep 11: David Cohn, an Architect's Journey Through CAD
David Cohn shares his extraordinary journey from architect to CAD pioneer and influential technology journalist during the pivotal early days of computer-aided design software.
• David's background as an architect and almost Olympic-qualifying run
• How government contract requirements forced architectural firms to adopt CAD technology
• First experience with AutoCAD 1.4 and its mere 28 commands
• Creation of the Memphis AutoCAD User Group newsletter
• Development of architectural add-ons for AutoCAD that predated SketchUp
• Journey from newsletter publisher to editor in chief of Cadalyst magazine
• Confrontation with Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz over the problematic Release 13
• Battle for editorial independence when covering Autodesk products
• Establishing Eclipse Software as an early AutoCAD third-party developer
• The surprising role software piracy played in AutoCAD's early market success
Hello everyone and welcome to the Masters of Technology happy hour, where once a week, I have a drink with someone I meet in the course of business, but someone I'd like to get to know better as a person. Thank you for joining me Today. I have the pleasure of having with me David Cohn. David Cohn has been a friend for a long time. David is, by education, an architect. He is well-versed in all sorts of CAD, which is how we got to know each other. I want to talk more about that, how we first got to know each other and how we continue. David, you're also an avid skier, I believe, and I think you were on the ski patrol.
David:I've been a member of National Ski Patrol for over two dozen years, right.
Roopinder:And I think you're a runner. I think you have a better mile time than I do.
David:I wouldn't call myself a runner anymore. At one time I was actually pretty good at the half mile. Half mile, quite sustained, I mean, I ran cross country and things as well, but the half mile was almost Olympic qualifying time. A few seconds off, being captain of my track team in high school, I actually made the US Olympic team. Oh, is that right? Yeah, so at what point did you decide to get out of that? If you want to compete at that level, you pretty much have to devote your entire life to that as a sole goal. I was interested in too many things to say. This was the only thing I was going to do.
Roopinder:At what point did you decide you were going to be an architect?
David:That came pretty early on. I was always interested in it. I think it was a toss-up in high school between being an architect or being an astronomer. I realized how much math and physics is involved in astronomy, much less so in architecture. That made the decision for me.
Roopinder:Oh, I see I've gone the other way. Not realizing my limitations on the spoken and written word, I went into math and engineering. The other way, not realizing my limitations and the spoken and written word, I went to do math and engineering. I found this right around here. I was digging through my bag of and you probably have a lot of these too, I think I see it. I was looking through my whole bag of show badges. Yeah, you can see that this is my first autodesk university and northampton community college. This is my first autodesk university A Northampton Community College. This is my first Autodesk.
David:University. I think Autodesk University was where we first met. I spoke at almost every Autodesk University for the first 25 years or so. I may not have spoken at the very first one, but I got involved as a speaker soon thereafter, once I realized that I probably knew as much as anybody else speaking there.
Roopinder:I felt like I had imposter syndrome just being there. I taught maybe one class for each of two years, but then there was people like you. Those were the days huh, you don't go to the shows so much anymore.
David:I may show up at SIGGRAPH. SIGGRAPH this year is just up the road in Vancouver, BC. My problem is, now that I've retired, I'm starting to lose contact with some folks. In fact, right now I'm waiting to hear back from Autodesk to find out if I will still get to stay in the Autodesk developer network. I worked for Autodesk for a very short while it was about six months stint as a strategist within the education department when we had a major exodus from my former employer, 4D Technologies. They did the CAD learning series of video-based training. I worked with them for almost 15 years. I was part of the development group and we all decided one day we had enough and we all left and then we all ended up at Autodesk. I did that for about six months and decided that I wasn't really cut out at that point in my career with being a cog within a big corporation.
Roopinder:Yeah, we have the same philosophy. I've always been a bad employee.
David:when I'm being told what to do, I'd probably be a good fit for me somewhere within Autodesk, but I was almost 70 years old and it was like why do I want to keep doing this? I'm enjoying what I'm doing now.
Roopinder:Are you 70? Now I'm 72. Are you? Oh my God, I would not have known.
David:I still keep my hand in. I've been doing some work. Eagle Point out of Iowa ended up buying the intellectual property, all the CAD learning property from 4D, which had really been. You know, as a strategist at Autodesk I had recommended that they do, that they buy all that intellectual property because it was a huge library of five minute videos about several dozen Autodesk products.
Roopinder:Yeah, I think you're probably the most well-versed in Autodesk products.
David:It kind of came about. So I was an architect, I had just gotten licensed. I was working for a 15-man firm in Memphis, tennessee. I was charged as a junior partner with investigating CAD programs because we were doing a lot of work for the Corps of Engineers, the Navy and the Post Office. All three of those entities came to us in the early 80s and said in a year we're going to require that all deliverables be CAD files. At the time the most prevalent CAD program was from Intergraph and ran on the PDP-11.
Roopinder:About a quarter million dollar investment just to get started, I remember that Wasn't that the Clipper AutoCAD had just been introduced at the San Francisco Computer Fair.
David:There was an AutoCAD reseller in town, and so we bought an IBM PC-AT 6 megahertz PC-AT with a 20 megabyte hard drive, 640 kilobytes of RAM and a copy of AutoCAD, and you thought you were a top dog, right, that was like a supercomputer, wasn't?
David:I wanted to take some training classes and my boss said, no, we don't have time for that, figure it out on your own. I started with AutoCAD version 1.4, and I think there were a total of 28 commands, and it turned out to be very good advice of go out and figure it out for yourself, because I learned just enough to understand what the program was doing and how to use those 28 commands to create some drawings. I had another opportunity to take classes.
David:Our local IBM reseller was doing a two-day AutoCAD training course and that second time around I convinced my boss to let me go to it. Having enough knowledge of the program at that point meant that when I got in class it was not trying to figure out how do I use it, but it was figuring out okay, how do I use this efficiently? Because the computer was slow, the software was slow. You had to swap out floppy disks because it came on like six floppy disks and you'd have one floppy disk installed to start the program and then you'd be swapping disks out as you went. After six months of just playing with it and then taking that course, I really thought I knew what I was doing with it.
Roopinder:Yeah, you were probably one of the leading experts even back then.
David:Oh, I did, there were enough architectural firms in town that were about the same size. None of us were going to be able to invest a quarter million dollars, but we could easily spend $10,000.
Roopinder:Oh yeah, I remember those vividly. I was on Applicon, those software Applicon workstations. I had made the mistake of recommending my company, which was just getting off the drafting board, onto CAD, this wondrous thing that would make you go 10 times faster. I sold them on Applicon Bravo, which went out of business, and the company then later went to AutoCAD.
David:Ours was a toss-up between CADv ance and AutoCAD. CADv ance was based on integer math. Ours was a toss-up between CADvance and AutoCAD. CADvance was based on integer math. AutoCAD was based on floating point math, and it was pretty clear that you can get a lot more accuracy when you've got a floating point out to eight decimal places, as opposed to integer math. So it's like, well, I think AutoCAD is probably a better bet, and so that's what we went with. What really turned it around for me was we probably a better bet, and so that's what we went with. What really turned it around for me was we started a user group.
Roopinder:Where were you, David? What was happening?
David:I was working for an architectural firm called Thorne. My immediate supervisor was Gene Strong, who was a wonderful architect, incredibly talented, who also had a degree in structural engineering. It was that combination of understanding structures and what it took to make buildings stand up, and the art and design behind architecture.
Roopinder:So rare to have that in one person.
David:And the focus was always detail the heck out of things so that there's no ambiguity. A contractor would be able to look at the drawings and understand exactly what we were intending to be built. So when we'd put a job out for bids, we wouldn't have great disparity between the highest bid and the lowest bid. They knew what we intended and also being able to design buildings that were watertight. You weren't going to have leakage problems around windows and at floor levels, really looking at the engineering behind the architecture. So it was great training.
David:I was one of the founding members of the Memphis User Group and I decided I would take on the role of creating a newsletter and I hadn't really thought about it at the time, but I'd always been interested in writing. So I started self-publishing this newsletter for the group and the group quickly grew and I decided let's send the newsletter out to every other user group in the country. Cadalyst magazine had recently started up in British Columbia and published a list of 50 or 60 user groups. I reached out to them and got mailing addresses for those 50 or 60 users groups, in addition to the 30 or 40 people in our group. When we first started, we printed 100 copies and mailed them to all the other users groups and it just grew from there.
Roopinder:I was in the Philadelphia area when this was all happening. I was writing for the Philadelphia AutoCAD user group. It's amazing to me after all these years I find out we were kind of like on the same journey. Tell me, how did it get to be Cadalyst then In very short order.
David:After starting that newsletter, I was approached by Addison Wesley Publishers. They had been in touch with Sandy Bolton, who was an early employee at Autodesk looking for someone to write a computer trade book. Sandy knew about my work with the Memphis User Group and suggested they get in touch with me, signed a contract to write a book about AutoCAD and was terrified. I took a $10,000 advance and then go oh, this is serious, now I've got to create this book or I've got to pay the answer. And then I was approached by Cadence magazine. Oh, so, that was a competing magazine that was published out of Texas, which is where I ended up, and so they approached me to write an article. My very first published article was in Cadence magazine and it was about combining AutoCAD with desktop publishing, which I was already doing because I was publishing a newsletter about AutoCAD. It was using Ventura Publisher. That's amazing.
Roopinder:Our paths have been so intertwined.
David:Do you recall which Cadence switch issue no, but then you got into a bit of a pissing match with Dave Basinski, the publisher at the time of Cadence. Here's what happened. I'll give you a quick chronology. I started publishing the Memphis AutoCAD user group newsletter. I had been using AutoCAD for about six months, took that class through the IBM store and discovered that the next release of AutoCAD was going to have a rudimentary version of a programming language that John Walker called AutoLISP. There was already some scripting capability, but AutoLISP was going to provide the capability of having variables that you could read what the program was doing. At that instant I had done a little bit of programming when I was in high school the high school I went to. I had no idea that it was rare at the time, but we had a timeshare terminal and you could actually write code in FORTRAN and run that code through the timeshare terminal.
David:When I was a student at McGill University, the architecture school was part of the engineering department and part of our requirements was we had to take a computer programming course. So I got to go over to the mathematics building and take some programming. So I knew enough about Fortran and BASIC. I wrote a program that would let me customize AutoCAD so that, instead of just drawing lines, arcs and circles. I could draw parallel lines that could represent walls and automatically insert a door or a window, which would break those lines, create a gap and insert a block. I created a program, the first of several, since I was working for the architectural firm.
David:My partners didn't want me doing this on my own, so we each kicked in $1,000. We had a $3,000 startup and created a company that we called SSC Soft Systems and that stood for Stratton Strong Cones. It was two of the partners in the firm plus me. One program that essentially created breaks in walls so we can customize AutoCAD to do what architects did, and then another program that I called the Auto scheduler, because blocks enabled you to have attributes and attributes meant you could fill in information. If you've ever looked at architectural drawings of a big commercial building, there's literally pages of room finish schedules and door schedules and I could automate all that.
David:And then I used my own newsletter to place advertisements for my software and that led to accepting advertisements from other companies and within a few months, my little newsletter, which was coming out monthly and had a circulation now of probably about 200, because we had over 100 local users and over 100 user groups 200, because we had over 100 local users and over 100 user groups and we were accepting paid advertising. And that newsletter became competition for Cadalyst and Cadence At the AEC Systems show. Ralph Grabowski, who was the technical editor of Cadalyst at the time, approached me with a missive from Lionel Johnston, who was the publisher and founder. They essentially decided rather than compete against me, why don't they just hire me? And so they made me an offer. They had to advertise in the Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail. They had to first prove to Immigration Canada that there was no other Canadian citizen that matched my job
David:expertise and after a six-month search and not getting any Canadians that had the prerequisite requirements to fill that position, they were able to offer me the job and got me a work permit, and they paid my family's move from Memphis, Tennessee, to Vancouver, British Columbia. That's how I joined Cadalyst magazine Right. So when I joined Cadalyst they were publishing five or six issues a year. They had just recently gone to what we would consider a more magazine format. Originally it was a little mimeographed sheet or Xerox sheet, yeah. So the mandate that I got from Lionel when I joined them was to convert it from bi-monthly to monthly within a year and to establish regular departments, set up an editorial calendar and grow the circulation. When I joined them, their primary circulation was through Autodesk. Lionel Johnston had gone down to Sausalito, California, met the founders and his initial distribution was managed through Autodesk.
Roopinder:So you were not quite what we'd call vanity press, but you were definitely a vehicle for Autodesk, I think initially Cadalyst magazine.
David:most of the copies that were sent out were sent to a mailing list controlled by Autodesk, whereas Cadence Magazine was started by people that had a background in publishing and understood how to launch a publishing startup, and so they controlled their own circulation. Lionel realized that the only way he was going to be able to grow the magazine was to become independent of Autodesk, at least to the effect of being able to manage its own circulation list.
Roopinder:You had to tear yourself away from the mothership circulation list.
David:You had to tear yourself away from the mother ship, and so I got some of the advantages of being closely aligned with Autodesk. In the early days, with the independence of being able to, I had started a little software company, this thing that we initially called SSC Soft Systems. I went to a couple of the early developer meetings out in San Francisco area before I ever joined Cadalyst. In fact, the first trip out there I showed up at Autodesk headquarters and Sandy Bolton, when she heard I was there, came running downstairs and met me and introduced me to John Walker and Duff Curlin.
Roopinder:Who had ever met John Walker?
David:John, who unfortunately died two years ago, would have considered me a friend. I think I was probably a closer friend with Duff Kurland. I met John Forbes and Dan Drake, who was also founder, and then later on was friends with John Cigneri. I joined John in 1991 in Baja Mexico for a total solar eclipse, because we shared another love for astronomy.
Roopinder:I'm going to stop for a second just to reflect on something, because it seems like you have given your entire professional life to Autodesk. I don't know if you feel comfortable talking about this. Autodesk was kind of like not in a love relationship where it doesn't go both ways.
David:It depends on who I'm dealing with In the early days. I was certainly very much welcomed at Autodesk. I went to early development conferences. The ability to plot to a file was something I asked John Walker for and it was added in version 2.5 or 2.6. That was really a breakthrough.
David:If you remember back in the early days of PCs, to get a computer to do more than one thing at a time you were actually time slicing. You would create what they called a terminant and Stay Resident Program. One of the first of those was a program I think it was from Borland called Sidekick. So it was a calendar and scheduling program and a contact list that you could hit a key combination on your computer and it would pop up on your screen and take over control momentarily. We created this TSR that we ended up calling Plump, p-l-u-m-p, which stood for Plot Dump. That took a plot file and sent it to the plotter in the background and we actually had a logo.
David:That was a relatively obese draftsman that would not go over these days. But I found a very talented artist up in Vancouver. She made the head out of a stocking and dressed it in clothing that she picked up from a secondhand store. I paid her several hundred dollars to make this, this and she made the man from our ads. We used to take them to trade shows and have them sitting in the booth Back in those early days, when AutoCAD ran on a very limited, like I said, a six megahertz PC-18 with a 20 megabyte hard drive and 640k RAM and a graphics card that you might get as many as 16 colors.
Roopinder:Yeah, this was a crazy time. This was a time where we were trying to get PCs to do our bidding, when the best engineers, the best architects had $25,000 workstations that could do this without question, and I remember reading an article in Byte Magazine that talked about how there was a chip inside that was essentially an oscillator.
David:It was a clock chip and it was socket mounted, which meant you could remove it and put in a faster oscillator, which would then run the computer at a faster speed.
David:And there was a company that would sell you a set of these clock chips at various faster speeds. You would shut the computer down, pull the chip out of your motherboard, put this other chip in and keep putting faster and faster chips in. If the machine ran after you swapped out the clock crystal, it was capable of running at that faster speed. You would keep pushing it until you got to the point where it wouldn't boot. So I think I probably ended up with a 20 or 24 megahertz crystal and the computer would divide that in two. The original PC-AT was a 6 megahertz machine but by being able to buy these chips and I think the set of chips might have cost 20 or 30 dollars my pc at ran at 12 megahertz because I was able to put a 24 megahertz crystal in it. So a lot of experimentation back in those early days yes, I was.
Roopinder:That was the wild west of personal computing.
David:I remember A<img src="https://media. licdn. com/dms/image/v2/C4D03AQGhjqUPRcSJqw/profile-displayphoto-shrink_800_800/profile-displayphoto-shrink_800_800/0/1516277506085? e=1759968000&v=beta&t=C9yT3ANQUVW_tzpHz8PlpkSZ79sxnwyeAAMlSL2RQyc" alt="Profile photo of David Cohn">Caalyst used to review a lot of hardware too yeah and that, and, and matt and ralph was in charge of those hardware reviews. Back in those early issues we did a Siskel and Ebert thumbs up, thumbs down. We would review stuff and whichever one of us did the review, the other would also repeat the steps and chime in Is this worth buying or not? So what happened with Cadalyst? You left Cadalyst. I joined Cadalyst in 1987 and they paid my move from Memphis to Vancouver, british Columbia. The magazine grew from about 40,000 subscribers at the time I joined by the end of 1988, we were up to 12 issues. We were up to over 80,000 subscribers.
Roopinder:One second. I'm just going to stop you there, because it made me think of how in parallel our careers were. I was also tempted away from my professional career an engineer, in my case, a professor to publishing, which I never had considered as an option. It never had crossed my mind that I'd be writing a book. And then when I met people at Keynes it was like hey, why don't you become our editor-in-chief? So it's like what the heck? But it was not an option that I ever considered. But because they threw so much money at me, it was like okay, this is an easy decision. Come on, we're moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, in your case, from Memphis to Vancouver, bc. How about that? Did they throw a lot of money at you Was it enough.
David:They really they threw the promise of a lot of money at me. Unfortunately, I left Memphis, Tennessee, which was one of the lowest housing markets in the country at the time, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, which was one of the highest. A lot of Hong Kong Chinese started buying up property in Vancouver, which drove property values even higher. By the time I was in a position to think about buying a house in Vancouver, a house in the city itself would cost over a million dollars. Is that why you settled in Bellingham? What happened was, by 1991, Cadalyst had grown so much that it was now a target For acquisition. It was purchased initially by a publishing house based in Eugene, Oregon, called Aster. Publishing started by Ed Aster. Their other publications were mostly in the pharmaceutical space, but they acquired Cadalyst.
David:I was in Canada on a work permit and my job was no longer in Canada. I couldn't remain unless I got landed immigrant status. We had put down roots in Vancouver and had a lot of friends up there. My sister had come out to the West Coast ahead of me. We grew up in New Jersey. She had done her undergraduate degree at Penn State and then did her master's degree at University of Washington. So I had family in Seattle.
David:So we picked Bellingham, Washington because it was literally halfway Vancouver and Seattle. It just turned out it was also a hotbed of Autodesk third-party development. There were three other AutoCAD third-party developers located in Bellingham, Washington so I became the fourth. Sc Soft Systems was the 13th or 14th registered Autodesk third-party developer Bellingham with an established talent base of people that knew AutoLISP. In very short order, you know, Autodesk added the ability to program in C. I had programmers that I could hire. I moved the company to Washington State, changed the name. I bought out my partners because I was no longer with the firm. Changed the name to Eclipse Software because I had gone down to Baja with John Signeri from Autodesk and rekindled my love of astronomy and said, oh, I just came back from this eclipse, let's call the company Eclipse Software. Came back from this Eclipse, let's call the company Eclipse Software. Eclipse wasn't available but Eclipse 3D was, so our URL was eclipse3dcom.
Roopinder:Wow, I remember. Now you're still in the same house.
David:It was a long time ago Same house. Connected with another third-party developer in the Bay Area. They had done an AutoCAD add-on much like I did, that customized AutoCAD for architecture. Right, Autodesk had just added the ability to work in 3D. Yes, I remember this time we created a program called Facade that, if you're familiar with SketchUp, did what SketchUp does, but inside of AutoCAD. You can draw a rectangle in AutoCAD and then grab it, stretch it and turn it into a 3D object. So you were SketchUp before there was a SketchUp. Not only were we SketchUp before there was SketchUp. Two of our early customers were the founders of @Last Software. They saw what we were doing with this. I think it was about a $295 add-on but it required AutoCAD. And they created SketchUp as a standalone program that did the same thing and didn't require a CAD program. I've told the story many times. I have their check hanging on the wall for decades. That was in the Release 11, Release 12, and Release 13 timeframe. That was in the Release 11, Release 12, and Release 13 timeframe.
David:Cadalyst was acquired by Astor Publishing, which was then acquired by a company called Advanced Star. I stayed with them until 1995. I was friendly with John Walker and a number of the other founders I was very good friends with Malcolm Davies, one of the early CEOs, and at one point Malcolm was supporting my attempt to get appointed to the Autodesk Board of Directors. I would have been the only member of the board that was a user. This was after the company had gone public. That never happened. But when Carol Bartz became the CEO, I had approached Carol shortly after accepting the position. Carol had to announce to the company that she had breast cancer and she was going to be undergoing surgery. I took her aside and you know kind of introduced myself and you know said that anything I can do to support her, I'd be glad to fast forward about a year. I am now at an Autodesk Far East Development Conference held at a resort in Bali, Indonesia.
David:Autodesk was in the thick of release 13. I had published an editorial in Cadalyst magazine called Shooting Yourself in the Flagship. Because, if you remember the book Crossing the Chasm yes, flagship. Because if you remember the book Crossing the Chasm, yes, one of the chapters in this wonderful book which I think is still a great read, you never want to do anything to upset the success you've had with your flagship product. And Autodesk had a problem. Release 13 was shipped prematurely. It had lots of problems and I was friendly with a lot of dealers. The dealers were telling me that they had stocked up on copies of Release 12. Release 12 was still outselling Release 13 because of those problems.
Roopinder:Nobody wanted to go to 13. It was a fiasco. Am I correct in remembering that Carol Bartz was responsible for creating Release 13? She just happened to be CEO.
David:I had gotten into some hot water with Autodesk before that Version 2.5 introduced a hardware lock.
Roopinder:Yeah.
David:Up until then AutoCAD was pretty easy to steal. That contributed to its success. When AutoCAD was first introduced the first year, they took it to Comdex. Autocad ended up on almost every computer in the Las Vegas Convention Center. This would have been Comdex 1985, and this was the introduction of a bunch of graphics cards, the most notable being the Mar Graphics MasterCard, which was capable of displaying 16 colors. But very few programs at the time could take advantage of the. Autocad just happened to be one of those programs. So it wasn't that they were necessarily that interested in showing off AutoCAD and all these other booths, but by showing off AutoCAD they could demonstrate the color capabilities of their graphics cards. Comdex was one of these places where I could connect with companies and get on their mailing lists. Las Vegas at the time was a very inexpensive place to go. Airfares were cheap. You could get a hotel room for $30 or $40 for the night, even in the middle of Comdex, and since I was publishing a legitimate newsletter, I'd get press credentials. So I got into the show for free and I had made some contact with Hewlett Packard. I became friendly with some folks at Hewlett Packard so that I was in HP's booth at Comdex demonstrating my little plot spooling software.
David:Autodesk had introduced this hardware lock that year. Hp's computers had a nine pin serial port. All serial ports before that were 21 pins and we did not have the adapter to adapt the HP serial port to the 20 pin hardware lock. Guy who had written the TSR program had also written a program that circumvented the hardware lock. We were using this program to circumvent the hardware lock and Autodesk got word of that. They came over to the booth and they brought us 21 pin adapters so that we could run AutoCAD on the HP computers legitimately. My friend at Autodesk said you must be the Teflon man because anybody else would have gotten thrown out of here. But Autodesk just said oh, David Cohn did it. Fine, just put this on here. Make sure everyone can see that the lock is now attached. My first run Drake was one of the people that came to the booth At that point. I knew Dan, and so it was like no, D an, I've got the locks, I just couldn't get it running this morning. This was the expedient way of getting the software working.
Roopinder:Had you come out strong against the hardware lock.
David:Because it had, because part of Autodesk's success was the fact that it was very easy to pirate the software. While a lot of other programs had various security schemes, autodesk didn't until the hardware lock. They took the hardware lock off in a subsequent incremental release, version 2.25, the next release that got out to the public, removed the lock.
Roopinder:So they actually, even though they didn't like piracy, they depended on piracy to be so.
David:I think a lot of other people within, the company would probably agree with the fact that, because it was so easily pirated in the early days, it contributed to the early success. Sandy Bolton, the employee that I mentioned, subsequently became the head of their anti-piracy division inside of Autodesk.
Roopinder:Now I take it, there was subsequent contact with Carol Bartz.
David:That editorial I wrote called Shooting Yourself in the Flagship would have been 1991 or 92. She took great umbrage with that and approached me at the kickoff party on the beach at this beautiful resort in Bali. She looks at me and goes what do you have against this company? I said, Carol, we've spoken before. I had to remind her of our previous interaction. I said I am like a minor satellite circling your planet. My entire career at this point is entirely dependent on Autodesk, the success of my magazines dependent on my being able to publish things that people want to read. And my saying the emperor has no clothes and the majority of AutoCAD users agreeing with me is in direct opposition to the story that you're telling, which is, yeah, there's nothing wrong with release 13 when we all know there's serious problems. So I said it's helping me sell magazines and, to your credit, you were a user advocate. I started out as a user and so I was always going to be an advocate first.
Roopinder:Right. How did it feel that you had to stand up to a CEO of a big company?
David:it eventually cost me my job.
David:Wow. Several years later, Cad alyst was based in Eugene, Oregon. I convinced ed astor to let me live and work from B ellingham, Wa shington. I had to get on a united express commuter plane one week out of every month, fly down to Eugene, spend a week in the office and then fly home. I did that every month for almost three years. Battles with Autodesk continued and it got to the point where the new publisher of Catalyst started insisting that my editorials had to be run by her. Up until then, I was able to operate as editor autonomously. My editorial was mine. Whatever I wanted to write represented my view, not necessarily the publisher's view.
Roopinder:Why do you think the publisher felt they had to tell the Autodesk view?
David:Because Autodesk was our biggest advertiser. Cadalyst called the publisher on Christmas Eve and told them that they would pull their advertising if I continued to be this loose cannon.
Roopinder:Which was all of the advertising at that point, wasn't it
David:Most of it.
David:Full-page advertising from most of the plotter manufacturers, graphics card manufacturers, most of the computer companies that manufactured computers that were powerful enough to run AutoCAD efficiently. There were lots of advertisers, but Autodesk was certainly the largest advertiser. At that point my editorials had to be vetted by the publisher, and I continued to do that for several months and then decided you know what? I can't do this anymore. I need to be free to express my own opinion.
Roopinder:You had some standards. You were still a user advocate. You felt like you were doing the right thing. This was around the time Autodesk LT was being released.
David:AutoCAD LT was released and it included AutoLISP. And then, on the eve of it being released, I guess, there were two disparate factions within Autodesk. One that thought AutoCAD LT should simply be a two-dimensional version of AutoCAD but still support most of the other features. Another group felt that not only should it only be 2D, but it should not have very much customization capability at all.
Roopinder:I see no AutoLISP.
David:Certainly no AutoLISP, and so I had written an editorial that I then had to rewrite because once the program was released, all those customization features were taken out. I had written an editorial that I believe I called CrippleCAD, and my publisher changed it to Differently Abled CAD. I took great umbrage because, I'm sorry, the word cripple is a legitimate word. I agree that it should not be used to describe disabled people, but calling something crippled was a very good description of what AutoCAD LT became compared to what I had seen in its pre-release version. Calling it differently abled CAD is making that direct connection to disabled people. I thought that essentially is an affront to someone who has a disability.
Roopinder:What gives you the right to tell me what they're right At that point they had us gives you the right to tell me what to write.
David:At that point they had us, and so at that point I didn't feel like I had the editorial independence that I had when the magazine first started. At that point I parted ways with the magazine, although I continued to contribute to the magazine for many years. I started writing for other publications. I had published several articles at that point for PC Magazine. I reviewed a lot of the programs that were able to open and display AutoCAD drawing files, dwg files, without having a copy of AutoCAD installed. There were quite a few of those.
David:Then I joined what was at the top called Desktop Engineering. Then it'd be called Digital Engineering. I wrote for Computer Graphics World. I know a lot of other CAD programs. So what essentially happened when I joined Cadalyst? In order to form a wall that separated my editorial responsibility from any potential financial gain that I would get from the fact that I also owned a company that was creating AutoCAD add-ons. Add-ons were almost entirely restricted to the architectural space. I never reviewed any architectural or architectural-related add-ons to AutoCAD. I focused instead on things in the mechanical engineering space. I focused on mechanical, which meant when Autodesk acquired the company that gave them entry into the mechanical engineering space and then, of course, they introduced Inventor. I also met the folks at SolidWorks, solid Edge and IronCAD. I didn't really understand a lot about manufacturing, although I learned things about the actual manufacturing processes over the years. My focus when I was with digital engineering, most of what I wrote about was MCAD. When I was with Scion.
David:Research. Most of what I wrote about was MCAD. I was making a fairly good living off the sale of the software developed from this company. I had other people running it, but I was the president and CEO. I didn't want to be accused that my editorial opinions were being influenced by the fact that I had a vested interest in the architectural CAD space Right, so I pretty much divorced myself from that space for decades.
Roopinder:I want to go on, but I don't want to take up more of your time. Let's continue this in another episode. Well, you'll have a reason to come to the Bay Area and you can visit me then.
David:I don't need a whole lot of excuses All the years of visiting Autodesk and all the other companies in the Bay Area.
Roopinder:Well, david, this has been great. I want to end it on a note of saying that we shall reconvene at a later date and talk more, because this has been fascinating the history of CAD. There's no better person to tell it from the Autodesk side. We'll look forward to another show. Very good, have a good rest of the evening. Thanks for being here. Talk to you again, see you.