Once the Scourge of CAD Vendors, Steve Wolfe Now Travels the World...and Gardens

The most influential voices in CAD are not always the ones who wrote the software. Sometimes they are the people who used it, often found it lacking, and documented it all. When CAD publishers honored CAD companies, Steve called them out. 

That’s why I wanted Steve Wolfe on the History of CAD podcast. Steve built The CAD Report, a paid CAD newsletter that was dreaded by CAD vendors and indispensable to CAD shoppers. 

Steve’s engineering education began at Northwestern and  continued at MIT. It's not all about CAD: a master’s thesis experiment on sea ice and what happens when oil gets trapped underneath. Then there are 9 years as an engineer with Electric Boat. After that came the newsletter.

We touch the early commercial CAD landscape, the rise of Autodesk and AutoCAD, and how proprietary CAD data formats can hold an industry hostage for decades. 

We also get practical and current: why CAD user interface design still struggles compared to fast sketching and design exploration on paper, why 2D thinking never went away, and how 3D modeling plus CAM and CNC can make parts fit the first time. Finally, we look at AI in CAD and AI for everything else... Like all the paper issues of the CAD report. 

If you want to go deep into the Wild West of CAD in the late 70s and 80s, and you appreciate strong opinions, you'll want to share this episode.

Transcript

Welcome To The History Of CAD

Roopinder 0:07

Hello and welcome to the History of CAD podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara, and I will be your host. On this podcast, we will explore the untold stories behind the tools that shape modern engineering and design. Each episode features conversations with the pioneers of computer-aided design, the innovators who built the software, and those who worked alongside them or observed or reviewed their work. Welcome to the show, Steve. Thank you. I wanted to just give you a chance to be on the podcast. It's called The History of CAD, but it's not. It's just people I've known talk about what they've done in the industry. So it's a chance to tell stories.

Steve Wolfe 0:52

Dave I've known for many years. He was a subscriber at Boeing almost from day one to the CAD report. And um uh and uh Burt Grad was a guy I had not met till just a few months before he passed away, but uh they have been putting together these uh IEEE uh special issues on um of the annals of the history of computing. They did one on computer-aided design uh probably about two years ago. And last year they asked me to write an article for their second Annals of the History of CAD. And I put a lot of work into that. But at the same time, it forced me to go back and look at all those CAD report issues. Of course, what's in the IEEE paper is just a very narrowly focused thing. And what and once again, this was Dave's idea. He's he's uh he's been in the industry for and um he knew my work, he knew exactly what I would be good at, and so I did that. Brad Holtz also wrote uh what they call a themed article, which is the longer articles at the beginning of the thing. John Hirschtick had a piece in there, Peter Marks had a piece in there. Somebody did an interview with Carol Bartz, I think, and uh, you know, so there's uh some guys from Unigraphics. So it's the two volumes together are an extraordinary account of the history, almost as much as anyone would want to read in this day and age.

Roopinder 2:24

But um uh that's let me introduce you. We've we've known each other for decades, and

Why Steve Wolfe’s Work Matters

Roopinder 2:30

uh but um I don't think a lot a lot of people like let's say born in this century probably don't even know you, but you're an important part of cat history. And at the risk of embarrassing you, I gotta say, when I first entered this profession, this profession being editor and publisher, I was quite in awe. Every chance I got, I used to reach trying to get my hands on this. And this was very hard to get. This was like gold, right? It's like you had to subscribe, but and uh if one of these got around you I could whoa, who's what is this? It was the only publication that told the truth, right? In my opinion. Well, you and you and another one. You another one, Ralph Grabowski.

Steve Wolfe 3:12

Oh, yeah, I know Ralph very well.

Roopinder 3:14

Um Ralph, Ralph, and uh David Weisberg, that's another one. But uh there's very few of them.

Steve Wolfe 3:19

Weisberg did not become a historian of CAD until after he retired. He really didn't begin writing his book until uh after the turn of the century. And uh the thing that's important about my work and about Grabowski's early work and about the early work that you did with uh Cadence and Cadalyst and those magazines is that there was not much internet then. And we had email and shit, but we didn't have we didn't have the wealth of online material in those days. And so what we had had to be printed, and um and it was enormously uh it was enormously inefficient way to distribute information, and um but but that was what there was.

Roopinder 4:06

And so um Let me ask let me ask you this though. What made you you you were an engineer? Where did you go to school, by the way?

Steve Wolfe 4:14

I did my undergraduate uh degree in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, where I met my

From Northwestern To MIT

Steve Wolfe 4:20

lovely wife, and uh then I went on and got a master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Roopinder 4:26

MIT.

Steve Wolfe 4:27

Yeah. And that's where I met David Gossard, yeah, who was at that time had nothing to do with CAD, but he was a um he was a TA in a class called the Dynamics of Machinery, taught by a wild and crazy guy named Henry Painter. I mean, he was quite different from the other professors, and um, you know, kind of a fascinating experience. And then um uh later on Dave got into CAD, I reconnected with him, and of course we knew each other. We knew each other way back when he was a TA and I was a grad student, you know, and there you you have a personal bond from that experience that it just it's just there, and uh it always stays there. So um that's how I I got to know him. And from him I got to know John Hirschtick because I I was in Boston for a conference and I went to Dave's lab and he said, Oh, let me have this, my one of my graduate students show you around. And that was John Herschick, and so that's how I got to meet John Hirschtick, and so all of the pieces came together and got into this business because when I was at MIT, I took a course in computer-aided design from a guy named Daniel Whitney, who uh was Dave Gossard said, Well, you know, Whitney's course is more or less all about optimization, which indeed it was. And so um when all this optimization stuff started, people started making noise about it, I'd actually studied it before. And um the other relevance that I had to CAD was when I was an undergraduate, I took a course in numerical methods, which uh I was always lousy at calculus, and I I because I I had a heck of a time with solving integrals and um differential equations and and that kind of stuff, and the teeth most of the teachers weren't very good. And so I um when I discovered numerical methods, I thought all these formulas, all these solving integrals, all this stuff goes away. This is like learning how to shoe a horse. You don't mean to learn how to shoe a horse anymore, because unless you want to make a hobby out of it. Right. And it's the same with that kind of math. If you want to make a hobby out of it, yeah, sure, you can have a lot of fun with it. But and you know, all those old guys in their equations, but the numerical methods just completely changed the game.

Roopinder 6:37

That blew you away, huh? So what happened there is okay. You graduated from MIT with a did you say masters or PhD? Masters.

Steve Wolfe 6:44

Master's, yeah. Yeah.

Roopinder 6:45

Master's. Okay. You went into uh work as an engineer?

Steve Wolfe 6:51

Yeah. Uh I had uh after I got out of Northwestern, I took a job in Connecticut with electric boat. And I just I thought submarines would be cool, but I just could not stand the bureaucracy. I mean, the whole point of general dynamics is to separate the taxpayers' money from the government and um building submarines and defending the United States is a secondary uh secondary purpose. Uh so after that I went to uh uh you know, I went and got my master's degree, and um MIT was kind of an unusual master's degree program, and they made you do a thesis. And so I got sponsored research on um working on offshore oil pollution, and um I did a thesis where I made a um a little model of uh the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. And um they the purpose was to discover what happened when oil got trapped under the sea ice. And so I built this container with inch thick walls of urethane insulate or foot-thick walls of urethane insulation. It had a tank in it, it had a refrigerated plate on top, and it froze just as the ocean would freeze. It froze everything from the top down. And so it created this stuff which looked very like real sea ice, which is peculiar stuff. It's it's it's most of your icebergs and your glaciers, yeah, those are land ice that has broken off of glaciers. That's glacial ice. Glacial ice is just like the purest ice cube you would make for a cocktail party. It's really, really hard, it's clear, and it's strong. Sea ice freezes from the top down, and as it freezes, it captures water, sort of like a popsicle. If you ever bite into a popsicle, you look and you see all this grainy stuff. Yeah, air bubbles has this vertical grain in it. And the vertical grain mean makes it means it's very, very weak. Uh and it's got a lot of salt in it. So when it breaks off, it melts pretty quickly. If you want to land a plane on sea ice, it will only have one-tenth of the bearing strength of, say, the McMurdo ice shelf in Antarctica, which is glacial ice that has floated out onto the sea. This is probably more than you want to know. But anyway, so I built this thing, we put oil underneath of it, uh, we got some oil from the North Slope, we put oil under it, and I measured the temperatures all the way through it, and took pictures of it and observed it all, and wrote this all up for the Journal of Glaciology. And um, it's funny how as I worked on that, people had all kinds of really nutty

Sea Ice Research And Oil Physics

Steve Wolfe 9:40

ideas about what might happen. And of course, what did happen was exactly what physics would have expected. You would have expected from physics to have.

Roopinder 9:52

Which was what?

Steve Wolfe 9:53

Oil is not a good conductor of heat. So when you put a layer of oil under there, yeah, it acts like an insulator. It essentially is an insulator and the sea ice stops forming. And eventually the sea ice will begin to form at the underneath on the layer underneath if it gets cold enough, but it doesn't grow very fast. So, what we would expect is that the undersea, because of pressure ridges and stuff like that, the undersea of the Arctic ice, polar ice cap is, you know, all uneven. The oil will find its way to the high points, it'll get stuck there, and it'll just stay there.

unknown 10:30

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 10:31

And it'll be a bitch to get out. I mean, but now that now that the whole damn thing's melting, it'll come out anyway. And and then you then you can try to maybe sweep it up. But um fortunately, they have not actually tried to produce any oil underneath the uh underneath the uh the polar ice cap, and I I think that's probably a good idea because it's a very dangerous environment which to work.

Roopinder 10:52

I wonder if that's in the plans to acquire Antarctica after we get Greenland.

Steve Wolfe 10:57

Um, you know, I I don't know to what extent there is oil there. Um it is uh it it is kind of an international place.

Roopinder 11:07

So it's but so is the nobody owns it.

Steve Wolfe 11:10

There would if you think there's a big stink about drilling off the coast of California, wail you see uh what these people do when you try to drill off the coast, because I just went on a cruise down there and eat these people who go down there and look at these animals, they're fanatics. They they are going to they'll steal a nuclear weapon to make those guys stop from doing that. And so, and plus it's going to be a very it's a it's an extremely hostile environment, uh, it's a very expensive place to work. And uh and I'm not sure there is oil there. You know, that's that's that's close enough to the surface and in s in sufficiently large volumes to yeah, yeah.

Roopinder 11:42

I want to talk more about that. Uh I you were now traveling and gardening, but uh first let's uh let's go in somewhat the chronological order here. Okay, so you went, you got your master's, you you solved the problem of oil under the Antarctic.

Steve Wolfe 11:56

Well, a part of the problem, right? There were I shared an office with uh another guy who was a French guy who was working on a different aspect of it.

Roopinder 12:04

So tell me this. Okay, so now what? Now tell me about your work as an engineer. What did you do?

Steve Wolfe 12:10

Well, then I I um as I said, I I'd met my wife when I was a senior at Northwestern, she was a freshman. Uh after I got my degree, I wanted to get a job in the Chicago area. So I went back to the Chicago area and took a job with a company called uh Chicago Bridge and Iron, uh, which is primarily a manufacturer of large plate and shell structures, uh, oil storage tanks. Uh, if you've seen um in the Midwest, you see these water tanks that every big every town has and they look like a lollipop. They go up above.

Roopinder 12:42

Yeah, sure.

Steve Wolfe 12:43

That was in that was invented by an engineer at Chicago Bridge and Iron many years ago. And they were getting into the offshore

Nine Years In Working Engineering

Steve Wolfe 12:50

oil business. I had applied for a job there, been offered a job there, and then took the job at electric boat instead. And um, so then I uh I went back there. I conned them into letting me work in the uh offshore structures department without having done what they called their field engineer work, which means going out and actually building tanks, which I thought was a great program, but I didn't want to do it, and so uh I didn't do it, and then I was I stayed in Chicago until uh my wife got uh till my wife until Jeanette graduated. We got married and then moved to California where I took a job with Solar Turbines, which is again a company in the offshore oil business, but making a different kind of product. The engines that went on offshore oil platforms for pumping oil and gas and also for uh uh making electricity for the platforms.

Roopinder 13:50

Got it, got it. How many years did you work as a practicing engineer doing this?

Steve Wolfe 13:54

I think about nine.

Roopinder 13:56

Nine years? Okay, all right. Yeah, similar, similar. What the heck made you go into publishing then? What made you think, oh, I'm gonna write about write about these tools, software tools that I use? What happened there? What flipped the switch?

Steve Wolfe 14:11

Um uh I I worked for solar turbines for about a year and a half, uh no, about two and a half years. And then I got tired of them because they were corrupt. And once again, the bureaucracy was it wasn't as stifling as the government, but it was still kind of a corporation. And then I um went to work for uh the largest consulting engineering firm in San Diego, which was owned by a guy named Hugh Carter and uh graduate of Caltech. He graduated the year I was born, and very, very bright guy, but he was the most successful consulting engineering firm in San Diego, San Diego, and you know, he always seemed to be one jump ahead of the bill collectors and um uh and that sort of thing. And so I thought, well shit. And one of my clients was the uh was the Los Angeles Times, and so I would go up to, you know, on behalf of Hugh Carter, I would go up to to Los Angeles and I would go around and I would see these enormous printing presses, and I would see computers and this big building and all this stuff. And I thought, man, publishing sure seems like a better business than consulting engineering.

Roopinder 15:20

Really? Okay.

Steve Wolfe 15:21

Yeah, and so meanwhile, back at Solar Turbines, yeah, my friend Roy Wysack, who I had met when I went to work there, he's he was a designer draftsman type, and he had been put in charge of the computer vision system that they had. And at that time, they had one system with four workstations, they had dozens and dozens and dozens of drafting boards, but only four seats of CAD. And Roy got put in charge of that. And everything else, Roy got very excited by it. And so he was, I came in one, so so I had by that time I had um I had quit working for the big consulting engineering firm and with another along with another fellow I knew there, and we started our own business called Engineers Cooperative. And we had two clients, one was the Los Angeles Times, which we sort of poached from Hugh Carter, although we didn't really, because we got Hugh Carter a whole bunch of work out of that. And uh the other was uh Fujitsu Microelectronics, which is a company that was owned by the Japanese Fujitsu, but actually did not make it in the United States market. And uh so I worked for those guys, and um once again it was a tough way to make a living, but it was kind of fun. And when Roy showed me the uh Stan Klein's newsletter and uh the Anderson

Starting A Paid CAD Newsletter

Steve Wolfe 16:40

report, he said, you know, you could write a better newsletter than this. And I looked at them and I said, you know, actually I could. Um now why why did Roy say that? That we've got to back up a second.

Roopinder 16:54

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 16:55

A few years earlier, Roy and I had written this the Handbook for Space Pioneers.

Roopinder 17:00

Space Pioneers, okay.

Steve Wolfe 17:02

And so I did the writing, and Roy did all the illustrations.

unknown 17:08

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 17:09

So he did things like maps of the planets could go and settle on. Roy and I were partners in this. He drew Roy drew these maps, star charts, showing where the planets, where the stars are, the planets you go settle are. And um he made other kind of wacky illustrations. Here was a planet that had to be terraformed, and so that's that's this is Roy's concept of a terraforming machine.

Roopinder 17:39

So this was way ahead of like any organization.

Steve Wolfe 17:44

This came out in 1978. At that time, there was only one exoplanet that anyone had ever seen, and it was not the sort of a place where anyone would want to live. Uh but um yeah, so so he and I had worked together and collaboratively, and he'd read my writing, and he knew I wrote pretty well. And so that's why he suggested that I that I start one of those newsletters. And so what he at the time Roy and I were casting about for how are we gonna have a business? You know, we're tired of working for corporate America. And um, there was a guy named Chase Revel who wrote these books on how to start different kinds of businesses. And one of the books he wrote was how to start a newsletter business. So I bought Chase Revel's book, I went through the whole thing, I did everything he said, I did it, made a direct mail campaign, I did a test market. I didn't sell, I sold enough of them, so I thought, well, you know, I think I could make a go of this. And but it it turned out to be harder than I imagined. If I were not young and foolish, I wouldn't have done it.

Roopinder 18:48

What was the mode of selling a newsletter back then? What did uh direct mail?

Steve Wolfe 18:53

Direct mail lists of people that you thought might be interested in subscribing to something on computer-aided design. And newsletters have to be fairly pricey, you know. This was uh this uh sold for uh uh I think the initial price was 96 bucks, and then it soon came to be 150 bucks because it couldn't quite make it at 96 bucks, and and so some financial newsletters sold for hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year. Uh and um uh but it was it was a tough sell, and you had to have people who were really hungry for information in order to pay.

Roopinder 19:27

This was this was a time where people were shopping for

The Early Commercial CAD Landscape

Roopinder 19:30

CAD and POM systems, right?

Steve Wolfe 19:32

It was it was quite new. The first commercial CAD systems, and once again, this is all wonderful history in this uh magazine. The people who were shopping for CAD systems, they commercial CAD systems had only really come on the market in the mid-1970s.

Roopinder 19:46

Right.

Steve Wolfe 19:47

This was 1981, and they hadn't been around that long. And the big the big guys in the business were Computer Vision and Applicon and Calma and Auto Troll and Calcomp had a system, they were the plotter makers, the pen butter.

Roopinder 20:05

And that's a trip down memory lake.

Steve Wolfe 20:08

That one issue I sent you, the first one on the CAD report, it sort of goes through it, it was the beginning of uh a series of 10 issues that discussed each of the top companies. IBM had just gotten into the business of actually selling the CADAM software. Uh before that, they had provided the mainframes on which Lockheed ran the software.

Roopinder 20:30

Right.

Steve Wolfe 20:30

Other and they arranged for for other aircraft companies to use it where they wanted to use it. And that's how they got involved with Dassault so and uh and uh Lockheed in the CAD business, but they had just begun selling the CAD software themselves then. And of course, the guys who got started maybe a year after I started the CAD report were Autodesk. And who knew that it would become they would wipe out all these other guys.

Roopinder 21:01

Yeah, who knew? Who knew it was one of the revolutions that you covered. So you ran it from the beginning at a time where it was very it was very critical information and it needed critical in many respects of the word because you did criticize cat companies for what they didn't do or they did wrong. And I thought that was amazing because we didn't, you know, I gotta tell you the truth, we didn't have the guts to do that in the pay in the business-to-business publishing world, which is advertising based. You can't.

Steve Wolfe 21:34

You can't do that if you rely on ads. And if you're uh but people don't want to pay for objective information. It is just, you know, a really tough sell. Although what we have today, the internet put me out of business, and I'm glad because I'd so much rather have the internet than still have CADCAM publishing. I can't tell you how much more wonderful the world is because. We have that. And now we have Substack. And Substack is the place where you go to get newsletters published where you don't take advertising, you rely on subscribers to support you.

Roopinder 22:15

You're thinking about getting back in the newsletter business there, Steve?

Steve Wolfe 22:18

Oh no, no, not at all. Not at all. I I still you can still buy the handbook for Space Pioneers.

Roopinder 22:24

Ah, yes, yes.

Steve Wolfe 22:26

And uh we published another book a few years ago. Um that's kind of a little short novel, uh based on the handbook for Space Pioneers Universe. But it's very hard to sell books. And I have only one friend who was a successful book author. And um I about six years ago we went to um WorldCon up in San Jose, and we took uh we took our uh we took the handbook for space pioneers, we took um we took our pet our pet shop from one of the planets, and we um we had t-shirts made, and we sat there, and these people came by who had read it as teenagers and bought it. But nobody else bought it. Then I started going to these other panel sessions at WorldCon and listening to the guys who were successful science fiction writers.

Roopinder 23:19

Oh, okay.

Steve Wolfe 23:20

And their whole lives were spent going to the cons. They went to the Star Trek cons, they went to all the science fiction cons, they got to know people, they talked, they schmoozed, and as and that was how they created demand for their writing. And you know, the only as I said, the only author I know personally who is an accessible book writer, he spends he makes more money from public speaking than he does from book royalties. And he has public speaking engagements every month. He's done that for years and years and years and years. And he and truth be known, his books aren't that good. But it doesn't matter because people hear you speak, think, oh, I like this guy, and he is a very personable per guy. And I like this guy, I like what he's writing about, and so they buy your book, and then they tell other people to buy your book, and so that's what that's how the game is played. And I have no desire to live like that. I enjoy my life, I enjoy my garden, I enjoy sailing a sailboat now and then, I enjoy traveling the world with my wife, and I intend to do those kind of things. And I spend most of my writing, I write a journal, a daily journal of our while we're on our trips. You're the journalist. Illustrated with my photographs. And to me, all the desire for writing, and you say, but nobody will read this, Steve. And I think I don't care. I don't write for other people. I write because I like to write. We travel together. I wrote down everything. I write down a lot. Mine is a logbook. Mine is a detailed everything you want, everything we did, boring or not. She cherry picks the interesting stuff and puts it in her blog. That's her outlet for writing because she was a journalist for 30 years.

Roopinder 25:14

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 25:15

And to make more money, she went into ghostwriting papers for oral surgeons.

Roopinder 25:23

Is that right? Wow.

Steve Wolfe 25:24

That made really good money. And she only had to work about 15, 20 hours a week, and she could make more money than she did working 50 hours a week as a journalist. So she did that for a while, and then finally got to the point where I was ready to retire. And I said, you know, do you really like this that much? She said, Well, no, not really.

Roopinder 25:43

So she stopped. I want to read you something from a gentleman who had also was on the show, Ron Close. You may not know him, but he remembers you to this day. He was uh, let me read you what I what he said about you. I don't know how much of your reputation you know, but here's here's what he said. I remember back in the Unigraphics version 10 days and Stephen Wolfe and the CAD report came out. That scared the heck out of us, man. It was because he called it like it was. You know, if you were trying to get something by him, you didn't stand a chance.

Steve Wolfe 26:18

Uh in the early days, they got a lot back. They got a lot by me, and I'm a little bit embarrassed about some of those early issues, which are uh only which are now residing in the computer history museum. And uh, I'm hoping that they will scan them and put them online someday, although I don't know whether they will actually do this because they are a big bureaucracy too. But um the reason for our attitude, uh once again, it goes back, it goes back to Roy Wysack because Roy and I worked together. I was an engineer, I would do calculations, I would give him little sketches, he would make detailed drawings with with uh pencil on Mylar. Everything in the handbook for Space Pioneers was ink, India Inc. on Mylar. Um, and he loved to draw. And when I went into business for myself, I like to draw. I'm not very good at it. Roy is very good at it, I'm not very good at it, but I like to draw. I like to sit down, and the CAD software was just so ugly, yeah, unpleasant to use. I still to this day prefer my mechanical drafting tools for drawing.

Roopinder 27:38

Do you have one back there? Do you have a drafting? Yeah, I got them.

Steve Wolfe 27:41

Well, I don't have a drafting board anymore, but I I have a little thing. I just make little sketches. Okay. But but er it's just like, and Roy said, why, why don't they talk to somebody who knows how to draw before they program this stuff? Because they could make it so much better. But they didn't. They all thought, oh, we know, we know what a draftsman needs. Oops, I forgot that. Oh, well, I'll just add it on as another clue. Pretty soon you wind up with this awful thing with 1600 commands, it becomes the world standard.

unknown 28:11

Right?

Steve Wolfe 28:12

How do you wind up with a Microsoft operating system as the world standard?

Roopinder 28:17

You spent your career and

CAD Criticism Without Advertising Pressure

Roopinder 28:20

professional life as a publisher, as if I could call you that, writing about 3D CAD. Yeah, you choose your media of choice is pencil and paper. Right? And 2D CAD, right?

Steve Wolfe 28:32

You use 2D CAD to make your that's all I need.

Roopinder 28:36

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 28:36

That's all I need. I have made 3D CAD models for projects around the house. I've got a a big, I'm looking out my window at a big um arbor covered with vine, it's made of steel. And I modeled that thing up in 3D, and I uh did a fine element analysis of it because I was concerned about uh it breaking. Uh I made other models that got, you know, my house is far out. And so we had an area where we just couldn't figure out what was going on. So I modeled that up in in SOLIDWORKS. And 3D is an extremely powerful tool. Yeah, I'm still friends with uh with Joe Dunn from uh SolidWorks. He lives here in San Diego, he's retired now too. And we had a my wife had a cutting board that she loved and came from Williamson, Outland, and nobody could get it anymore. So I took it over to Joe, and Joe has gotten into CAD and CAM. He he noodles around with CAD CAM as a hobby. So he has this milling machine, he's got on shape, he models the cutting board in on shape and puts it on his milling machine. So the ability to model stuff up in these CAD systems and then mill it, it has saved American manufacturing. It allows American manufacturers to be competitive in things like prototypes, small production runs, tool making, stuff like that. We still do a lot of that stuff in this country. And the machinists they had to learn NC or die and or lose their jobs. And uh and they did. And it's um it's an extraordinary technology, but it's not everything. When you're designing, sometimes it's a lot easier to sit down and just do a bunch of 2D sketches of things before you say, okay, now I'm ready to look at what it is in 3D. Yeah, and the 2D sketches in the CAD systems are pretty awful. One of the reasons SOLIDWORKS is less bad than many is that Roy worked as a consultant very early on, telling them, look, make it like this. This is how people draw, these are the kind of functions you need. This is how you this is how the work has to flow. And very few companies had anyone of his caliber advising them.

Roopinder 30:53

I think to this day, only one company has has even used a pen a pen pencil paper type interface to their CAD program. That's uh Shaper 3D. Everyone else is uh still using keyboard and mouse to you know make uh for the interface.

Steve Wolfe 31:12

Keyboard and mouse, keyboard and tablet, that was never Roy's issue with it. It's the flow, it's the way you want to lay things out so that you can figure out how, and once again, we're talking about industrial design, we're talking about buildings that are factor, you know, that that are that are rectangular, factory floors, machinery, stuff like that. The way you want to work with that kind of stuff is not the way these systems allow you to work, and it's too bad. The people who had probably the best of the best of that sort of thing was Ashlar. But yeah, it wasn't AutoCAD, and so nobody wanted nothing to do with it because it didn't the data formats weren't compatible, and we are still hostage to AutoCAD's data formats.

Roopinder 32:03

Yeah, that's true, that's true. Yeah, we you know, and we engineers we share that uh this concept of you know getting designs quickly down on pencil and paper rather than 3D modeling. I talked to an architect and he said, hey, still, pencil and paper, that's the fastest way to get my ideas down, right? Quickly. I'm not gonna be able to do that on a CAD system. If I have a bunch of ideas and I just want to do design exploration or shape exploration, that's how I'm gonna do it.

Steve Wolfe 32:30

That's absolutely true. And uh and no one has wanted no one in the CAD business has thought this was an important enough problem to solve.

Roopinder 32:42

This whole thing about AI, we've got to talk about AI. You must have heard about it, right? Don't you think it's wonderful, yeah. Exciting

Why CAD Still Feels Hard

Roopinder 32:50

time to be in.

Steve Wolfe 32:51

It's why I want, it's why I gave my newsletters to the computer history museum in a with the promise, whether they will honor the promise or not, to scan them and make them available in character-readable format. I don't own that information anymore. But if someone wants to find out about the history of CAD, they can use AI and they can look through my stuff, and if they can find your stuff from the early days still online, and whatever other documents they can find that are become by these outfits like the history museum and scanned and put online, they can put all those things together and they can summarize this history in ways that uh that give us new insights into how things should be done. AI is wonderful stuff.

Roopinder 33:37

You gave up the copyrights to the CAD report?

Steve Wolfe 33:40

What was gonna happen to them when I died? My sons had come in here and throw them in another recycle bin. So I thought this is my this is my only shot at preserving this information because I don't remember that stuff anymore. Don't ask me to tell you what's in the CAD report, Roopinder. I don't remember. I have to look it up. And if people want to find out how the CAD, early history of CAD, I don't know why you might want to do that. And I don't care. And who knows whether churning through that and comparing other ways, other kind of software developed, might come up with whole new idea, whole new ideas about how to do how it was done wrong and how to do it right in the future. I don't know. But it's marvelous that we now have people working on this stuff.

Roopinder 34:29

Okay. I'm glad they're doing that because you know I can't, I couldn't find your stuff online for the life of me. And uh and I hope that is becoming available to a lot of people. But I have to tell you, if it wasn't for that, the only memories are gonna be of people with with your criticism of their software burnt into their brain that they'll never forget.

Steve Wolfe 34:52

And that's too bad. Because my criticism is done in the spirit of let's make this better. Yeah, let's make this something that people really take great pleasure in using.

Roopinder 35:04

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 35:04

And um Consumer Reports beats up on the automobile people.

Roopinder 35:08

Yeah, they shared.

Steve Wolfe 35:09

Japanese automobile makers in the early days they took everything Consumer Reports wrote very seriously, and they worked on making their cars really quite as pleasant as driving a car can be.

Roopinder 35:22

It's publications like that can actually make a difference because once again, they're not catering to advertisers. They don't have to write nice things, they don't have to delete things that are critical, right? Which I have often had to pull things down because they were too critical for uh in the eyes of the advertiser, right? So it's it's an awful feeling, but yeah, as engineers, I I resented it. You know, I resented it quite a bit that I had to because we're trying to come up with stuff that works.

Steve Wolfe 35:49

The whole idea of being an engineer is let's get something that works. Oh, it didn't quite work right. Oops, it broke. Well, what do we have to change? Where do we have to make it thicker? Where do we have to reshape this thing? That's what we do. And there are engineers who get their backs up and get very defensive about their designs, but as far as I'm concerned, they're not good engineers. A good engineer has to have an open mind about where did this go wrong? How could I have done this better?

Roopinder 36:14

Yeah. And don't you think like if you learned something as an engineer, it's kind of almost an obligation that you tell other engineers about it?

Steve Wolfe 36:22

This is how Oh no, no, people have a right, people have a right to their trade secrets. And in other words, if if you have some way of making um a better automobile engine than uh than General Motors or making an automobile engine that makes smog while being more efficient, and General Motors and Ford don't know how to do it, uh you have every right to uh keep those cards close to the best. Uh what I object to is I'm not a big fan of intellectual property. I'm not a big fan of uh the government protecting so-called intellectual property. I to me that's just like slavery. And uh we're coming up on Juneteenth when slavery ended, and I think it we we will there will be a hundred years from now, people will look back on intellectual property as uh as the equivalent of slavery, and uh it'll be gone. But um Interesting Well, what about what about copyright? How could you make a living without copyright? I couldn't make make a living really with copyright anyway. So, but there's nothing wrong with having trade secrets, but trade secrets are only gonna let you get ahead. They're only gonna last you for a while. They're not something like Autodesk who can sit on this old code from that Mike Riddle wrote for 50 years and keep other people from accessing that data. Baloney. And yet there's the United States government and all the other governments of the industrialized world backing them up.

Roopinder 37:49

I'm reminded of how they fought not just for their not just for their software, but also for their data format, how they uh they kept their data files secret, their format secret, right?

Steve Wolfe 38:00

And that controlled the that was a language in which all design was that's why companies like Ashlar with better user interfaces couldn't compete, because they were unable to really be able to write that information, read that information in from an AutoCAD system. And maybe now you could use AI to smarten it up and write your information out to an AutoCAD system. And so maybe somewhere along the way AI will help bring about their undoing. I hope so. Maybe always hope.

Roopinder 38:31

You know, one thing that we I'm sure you're aware of and are interested in that uh AI is helping sort astronomers sort out uh stars and planets out there, right? That is so much data, so much movement in the in the well, anytime you have a massive amount of data, yeah, and you're trying to find patterns in it, this is something wonderful.

Steve Wolfe 38:54

I mean, the stuff Brad, the company Brad Holtz went to work for, uh Pattern Computer, uh, they're taking massive amounts of medical data and uh uh they're trying to figure out you know how to make how certain proteins work in viruses and cancers and and whatever else. So yeah, it's only the beginning. It's a marvelous technology. Anybody who is afraid of it is probably afraid of their own shadow, and uh I have no patience for them. Technology is a good thing, progress is a good thing, computers were a good thing. I'm my slide rule is I'm glad it's in the box gathering dust because you know the things we have today are marvelous. But that also doesn't mean there's I still keep mine.

Roopinder 39:43

I have this circular. Have you ever seen this? The circular slide rule?

Steve Wolfe 39:47

Oh my goodness, yeah, I remember those. No, no, we can't we can't give them away because they're part of our heritage, but yeah, that our kids will throw them into the dumpster when there's cleaning out our stuff.

Roopinder 40:00

Legendary, isn't it? I remember um the head of uh Skunkworks, uh his name escapes me, I'll have to, but the guy he would uh do all these calculations using a slide rule, and then Skunkworks went on to make like the most amazing aircraft, like the SR 71 Blackbird, right? And never was a computer brought into play there, or a calculator, even, right? Right.

Steve Wolfe 40:24

And but it was it was a lot of it was a lot of very tedious work, and for every engineer, there were hundreds of draftsmen and and craftsmen and pattern makers and people making templates in

Tools That Changed Making Things

Steve Wolfe 40:40

wood and all that other kind of stuff, and then you put the first one together and nothing fit. And then you had a you had to bend it and you had to redo them, and and you know, you certainly didn't want to fly in the first one. And uh so CAD and C 3D modeling and and CNC um uh really did make that whole process better than it was. It's still fiendishly complicated. It is better than it was.

Roopinder 41:05

It's yeah, I I totally get it. You know, I've also been writing about, you know, not as extensively as you perhaps, but writing about 3D CAD for a long time and uh and using it, and uh uh but okay, here's my confession, and I made this before on the air. It's like, okay, I love what it can do. I love it when I did make projects in 3D solid models, and everything I take it to the shop and the stuff just fits, right? I don't have any bad cuts, right? I'm a woodworker, amateur woodworker, and this the joints just all fit together. I'm not wasting any wood. Wood is precious, right? Not wasting any of it. It just snaps together. It's like this is joy, right? If I can butt on the but but now what happened is nowadays, you know what I do? I sketch it out on my I use a freeform. It's a it's an Apple's sketching program, and I use an Apple Pencil, right? But it's basically pencil and paper concept, right? It's I take that into the shop with me. I sketch it out on there, I take it on the shop, and then I cut away because it's too hard for me to relearn 3D CAD systems, right? Because I don't use them every day, right? I I just can't get up the invest the time to relearn them again. So it's CAD is just really hard to use. I'm waiting for AI to make that easier. I'm waiting for for CAD AI to say to me, okay, now make me a shelf. If I want it this big, go at it, right? What do you think?

Steve Wolfe 42:40

Yeah, I I I think that's from what I know of AI today, and basically what it is is it's a kind of a natural language processing one, natural language queries.

Roopinder 42:53

Right.

Steve Wolfe 42:53

Marvelous. You know, you I don't know whether you ever worked in an SQL-like language, but I wrote my first subscription fulfillment program in Fortran, and that really sunk. And then covered uh uh X Base and um it I I thought I died and gone to heaven, but it was still a very arcane way of working. And then as it as systems recruit became more complicated, we had uh our last subscription full fulfillment system work was based on uh uh SQL server, and it was a bear. I couldn't program it. I my right hand man, uh my two right hand men were able to make that thing uh do what I wanted it to do. But but Google in the early days for me, you'd you'd ask it something, and you know you get all these different things, you'd have to sort through it all. No, it just gives you a summary of years, this and this. Sometimes that's good enough. Sometimes you click through and you say, Well, I want to read the source material because I this is important. And um uh but my God, this has all happened in the last five years. Less than that. It's just extraordinary.

Roopinder 43:57

It's extraordinary what this stuff's going to do for us.

Steve Wolfe 44:00

But if you can't think critically, you can't use it. If you're an airhead and you believe everything some politician says, then all the AI in the world isn't going to help you. And it's the same way with this. To make a better CAD user interface, you have to understand the design process. And these AI things are not very good at design.

unknown 44:26

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 44:26

They are good at cobbling together other people's material. And once again, to take an example of that.

Roopinder 44:37

I have no idea where this is heading.

Steve Wolfe 44:39

And they have three arms and three legs.

Roopinder 44:41

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 44:42

And so Roy took photographs of it and he started. And this you can see he's still he's still at this stuff after food. He took photographs of this guy and he tried to animate him. And he's got three legs. Well, nobody really knows how a three-legged creature, what would the joints in a three-legged creature, what would the skeleton of a three-legged creature be like? And in fact, we don't know. We just made it up.

Roopinder 45:09

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 45:10

And so he gives it to the AI, and the first thing the AI does is takes off one of the legs and makes it into a tail. Because that's all it knows. Everything has two legs and a tail. There isn't a thing with three legs. So when you say, you know, you can look at all the CAD systems in the world, the AI will come up with another bad user interface. Because now because it takes it takes a uh human ability to understand what the task is all about, and AI is not there. Maybe someday we'll have Cylons. Uh, you know, I hope they're as pretty as the ones on Battlestar Galactica, but not yet. That doesn't mean that the stuff isn't quite wonderful, but that's amazing how it's coming into our life.

Roopinder 45:55

You mentioned uh its use uh in astronomy. Uh we talked about that. But I'm I don't know if you watch sports, but uh I'm amazed by how sports casters can they're not I know they're not doing SQL queries, right? No, they're they're able to get like amazing fast, like you know, like real are really weird stuff. Like the last person, this last time this shooter shot from a 23 feet and was traveling this fast was back in 1963, right? Or something. They I don't know how they do that. It's like I well, I kind of know it's they're using AI to mine the the data.

Steve Wolfe 46:32

I mean, all the historical information is on the internet. First of all, it has to be there, right? And that's why that early stuff from the CAD report, that early stuff that you wrote, it is not there. It's not there, it doesn't exist as far as it doesn't exist anymore because it was on paper, and that's why I'm hoping the computer history museum will do something about this.

Roopinder 46:52

I hope so too. How could we make sure of that?

Steve Wolfe 46:55

I don't know. I mean, uh call them and say, hey, you know, I hear you guys have all the old CAD report issues. Are you gonna put them online? Or become a member, and then when you join up, say, hey, when will you put the CAD? You know, when will you put the CAD reports online? Um I just gotta have another membership.

Roopinder 47:14

Stuff is important. I know yours your CAD reports were used as material for for Weisberg's history of CAD, right?

Steve Wolfe 47:21

Yeah, he I gave him a whole I had a whole couple of rooms, I had a whole room stuffed with paper.

Roopinder 47:28

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 47:29

He went through it all and he took all the paper that he wanted. I said, Dave, if you're gonna write a book, God bless you, I ain't gonna write the book. And uh so he took a lot of that stuff and and he used some of it and he took papers. Weisberg's book is marvelous, marvelous that it's online, but it needs to be preserved online by some institution that's in the business of preserving things. Um, Weisberg's book is secondary material. He wrote that years after the events took place. You and I wrote about the events as they were taking place in the early 1980s and 90s. And then by by 1995, the internet was starting to come on strong and and the handwriting was on the wall that we were gonna go out of business. Yeah, that that period, that early period is very um it's very important to capture that information if you want to have a complete history of what happened. And there's a lot of other wonderful newsletters that were written. Bruno Bassi's newsletter about IBM mainframes was a marvelous, marvelous newsletter. And uh I I don't know what happened to Bruno or the newsletters.

Roopinder 48:35

I can't compare it to your work, but I I'm like, There you go. Those things I yeah, I save, I managed to save the couple of years I was at Cadence. I managed to save those issues, but where where the rest of them are, oh I know where they are. I think they might be in the trash because the old editor just got rid of the site. Oh no, you didn't do that, did you?

Steve Wolfe 48:57

Yeah, no, no, he did, yeah. And so that's why uh if if this information could be if these ins institutions they want to collect physical stuff and they want to put on a Disneyland type show, and I guess all right, that's okay.

Roopinder 49:09

Uh just how long did you do the CAD report? Pardon? How long did you do the CAD report?

Steve Wolfe 49:14

In print, 20 years.

Roopinder 49:16

20 years. That's a massive amount of uh uh work.

Steve Wolfe 49:20

And I I still have online because we composed it and uh ready we made it ready for the printer online.

unknown 49:28

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 49:28

That was uh that stuff was um so I have those in PDF form and they are they are scannable. I mean they are OCR. They you know you can search text through those formats in PDF. But before that, you know, they would have to be scanned and optical character recognized and all that kind of thing, which is some work, but it ought to be doable. And there's a tremendous amount of material that the computer history museum ought to be collecting and putting online. Because that will tell people the history. And I think that was what Bert Bert Brad was really about. He really wanted to see that happen. And uh uh he was very passionate about it, but he was 97 and forever.

Roopinder 50:19

Yeah, no, no, you don't. No, it's got to be some way to preserve this. You mentioned Brad Holt Holtz, and uh I remember the days of COFES. Did you find yourself missing industry shows and those CAD shows?

Steve Wolfe 50:31

No, because the whole thing got very boring. It all came down to uh monopolizing the intellectual property, it all came down to buying the slaves before the other guy with a plantation down the river could buy the slaves. That's really what these guys are all about now. Yeah, I mean the most absurd thing in the world was a merger of ANSYS and Synopsis. Synopsis. And yet, well, we're just gonna we're gonna cook up these big corporate deals. Well, you have to have all this software, so we'll give it to you all in the package for a discount.

Roopinder 51:26

I don't get that.

Steve Wolfe 51:26

But that's what it's turned into. Uh Parasol is as old as AutoCAD, it's more than 50 years old. It's it's the main 3D format. And we were in the in this other interview that I did a few weeks ago with Kasich. And do you know Dave or not?

Roopinder 51:45

No, I don't.

Steve Wolfe 51:46

I should see if I should see if I can uh get him to send you that. I mean, I I don't know. You know, it's all IEEE stuff, and we we have to dance around this property nonsense, which is nonsense. It's all common knowledge, it's part of our surprise.

Roopinder 52:00

I'm actually surprised that IEEE took such interest in in you. You you didn't write most of your writing was about MCAD stuff, right?

Steve Wolfe 52:08

MCAD But IEEE also has SIGRAPH.

Roopinder 52:11

Ah, okay, that's a connection.

Steve Wolfe 52:12

3D graphics, that's tough. I mean, Dave is Dave. This this this these lectures were done under the auspices of the cigarette pioneers. And there were some I'll send you the thing. There are some famous guys on this conversation with me who were pioneers of 3D modeling. You know, they did some of the early work in 3D. And um Ken Versprille's passed away uh uh recently, I guess, but but he, you know, is his his Paris, I mean, um, Parasol had put all that stuff together. The B-splines, the NURBS, all that kind of stuff, put it together, and it is still a remarkably compact way of storing 3D information. Because, you know, one once upon a time, I and some other people got excited about the idea. Well, why don't we make it all of voxels? You know what pixels are like when you start to take pictures. As you want, as you get higher and higher resolution photographs, yeah, it all starts to blow up on you, even if you're using JPEG to compress it. If you take all your pictures in raw, you'll have disc drives up to the ceiling, even if they're semiconductor drives. So there's a lot to be said for these uh analytic representations. And the question is then, but then they are also they also don't give you the kind of tactile sense of being able to work with your hands and smooth things. If you watch a potter at work, if you watch a sculptor at work, you know, there's there's we can't do these things with computers. There's still a wonderful role for these.

Roopinder 54:00

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing after you know, a lifetime spent, uh almost a lifetime spent in uh in a with computers, professional career, or professional career, I should say, it's still working with my hands that gives me the most satisfaction, right?

Steve Wolfe 54:16

Yeah, it is. It's very satisfying. Yeah, very satisfying. I one of the things I do, I know I'm not interested in sports at all, but the only sport that's worth playing is sailboat racing. And in the summers I go out and sail every week. I'm not very good. I'm still not very good, but I just love getting out there and it's just you and the sailboat and the wind, and there's there's no electronics.

Roopinder 54:39

It's just watching physical world, you and nature.

Steve Wolfe 54:47

We want it we want the computers to help us do the most boring grunt work, intellectual grunt work. And they have. I mean, my when my mother worked for a big insurance company as a bookkeeper, you know, doing everything in pen and ink and with a mechanical calculator on her desk. I mean, that was not a wonderful

Gardening Travel And Staying Healthy

Steve Wolfe 55:10

world to be in for a young woman.

Roopinder 55:12

No. And uh so tell tell me what you're doing now. So we are you're doing a lot of gardening. You have a vegetable garden or a flower garden?

Steve Wolfe 55:21

Oh, I have a I have a garden. I have fruit trees, and I I grow tomatoes, and my wife grows other vegetables, and yeah, but we also have all kinds of flowers, and we uh we took our swimming pool and made it into a freshwater pond. So it's got fish and it's got water lilies in it, and uh, and we're we're working on because you know, water is very scarce down here, and um so we're working on um, you know, we've got we got another we've got some other parts of the property where we're working on more natives. I have a house that I rent, the tenants don't like to pay the water bill, so I'm I'm trying to read landscape that is a low water, but using California native plants. So then you gotta learn about the native plants that look good and the native plants that work and so forth. And you know, and you try things out and they don't work, you gotta try something else. I mean, it's and then you know there's the insects you gotta worry about. The insects have gotten in the my fig tree. There's a fig fly and it lays its eggs in the fruit when it's very immature, and the fruit will start to ripen, and then it will sicken and fall off, and the you know, the creature, the the larvae will crawl out and fly away and lay more eggs. And if that gets up your way, Roopinder, there's not gonna be a commercial fig in the grocery store. Yeah, um it's there's a marvelous amount of stuff out there, yeah. And then you go traveling around the world and you meet all these strange and different people, and you realize they have very different viewpoints. You've traveled a lot.

Roopinder 57:01

You've you've traveled a lot.

Steve Wolfe 57:03

There's a marvelousness of it.

Roopinder 57:05

Do you have a map there with the pins in it that shows all countries you've been to? How many countries have you been?

Steve Wolfe 57:11

About 95 or so.

Roopinder 57:13

95%. Yeah, no, there were that many.

Steve Wolfe 57:16

No, there's a there's uh hundred and you know, eighty or something. Anyway, so they're all these guys. And um oh man.

Roopinder 57:26

But the other thing is um send me a picture of that so I can put it up on the back.

Steve Wolfe 57:31

The the other thing is I have on my uh right now for my screensaver, I rotate them around. So right now I've got I've got Jeanette's pictures of uh of India.

Roopinder 57:40

Have you spent a lot of time there, unfortunately?

Steve Wolfe 57:42

Yes, you have, and the pictures of India are so fantastic.

Roopinder 57:48

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 57:49

I mean, have you ever heard of these guys in Kerala who do this this i theater? I mean theater?

Roopinder 57:58

No.

Steve Wolfe 57:59

No, I mean I gotta send you, I gotta send you some pictures of these guys. You said, did you ever go to Durga Puja?

Roopinder 58:06

Uh no, I managed to miss it. I heard that.

Steve Wolfe 58:08

You missed Durga Pucha. You know, you gotta go back and go to Durga Puja because that is just the most fantastic. There is nothing like that. In the in the uh North America or Europe, there's nothing even remotely like Durga Puja. Yeah, yeah. And all the other stuff. I mean, we went to um where is it on the Ganges River, the um the city uh where they burn people and uh V, doesn't it?

Roopinder 58:37

Varanasi. Varinasi, yes.

Steve Wolfe 58:39

Varanasi. I mean, we have these pictures of these guys that you you see hanging out in Varanasi. I mean, it's just and they just have very different ways of living. Um we've been to Africa, you know, we help these these African ladies with we give them money and they they have these loan pools and they they borrow money and they use it to you know get somebody to build a fence to keep their pigs, or you know, they need it, they need working capital so they can have a little store and buy merchandise and and stuff like that. So we we give them money for that kind of thing. And I I see I see women in their 90s, so little old woman in her 90s. She's living in a little farm with no electricity and no running water, and she is surrounded by her grandchildren, and she is just as happy a person as you would ever meet anywhere. There's just there's lots of different ways to live. There's lots of different ways that people have lived, and to get out there and learn about all these things, let alone you know, gardening, biology. To me, I love machines. I like my I put in a solar system to make electricity.

unknown 59:55

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 59:56

I bought an electric car. And so now I'm trying to figure out how to gain the system to get the greatest of value out of the uh car business. Because the utility- which electric car did you buy? It's just a plug-in hybrid.

Roopinder 1:00:08

Plug in hybrid, okay.

Steve Wolfe 1:00:09

But my wife wants uh a pure electric. And I've discovered that the since I have more electricity force that I produce more electricity than I consume, far more electricity than I consume. But if you sell it back to the utility company, they don't give you very much for it. So really now the name of the game, now that Trump has goofed up the world oil supply, the name of the game is you they've also cut the peak rates to in the middle of the day because there's so much solar power around. They've cut the peak rates in the middle of the day. Okay, all right. So now they've they've bombed the price of electricity in the middle of the night, and they've bombed the price in the middle of the day. Well, what do you do with it in the middle of the day? Well, you take and turn your, you don't want electricity, you turn your solar power into motor fuel at $6 a gallon, and now you're talking some real money. Yeah. You know, studying all these kind of system things interests me, but biology is much more interesting. And then, you know, we're getting old and we just have to stay alive. You know, I uh and that that's an increasingly maintenance, you know. II I had this, uh everyone thought it might be a tea when I was over in um in uh New Guinea, and I couldn't go on part of the trip. I decided I didn't want to go out in the middle of absolutely nowhere where nobody can get you out. And uh uh well it turns out it was probably, you know, it probably was nothing to do with cardiovascular stuff. It was probably low sodium from the blood pressure medicine I'm taking. So, and this is simple stuff. People with these awful cancers, I mean, wow, there's lots to do, there's a great deal to do, but better machinery. We've got an awful lot of very good machinery, and we've got an awful lot of people who are very good at making it.

Roopinder 1:02:03

Yeah, the simple hydration in your case, right? You just have to get properly.

Steve Wolfe 1:02:07

Well, I I'm not sure. It's you know, your your electrolytes get thrown off, and um, but I went to see a doctor. Uh he's got all his tools and he he's got all his instruments in there. He weighs me, he takes my blood pressure. He's got the same blood pressure graph that I do, it's 100 years old. And uh uh and he says, you know, well, it it could be says I've seen people because I've seen people pulled out of the river with these conditions, and maybe it has to do with dehydration, you know. He asked about what medicine I was taking. I told him about my diuretic, he knew what it was, he knew all that kind of stuff. I get back, I see my cardiologist. First thing he says, the first meeting is maybe that was it. And then he says, No, it couldn't be. So we do all these other tests on me, and it turns out actually, I don't have any problems. I mean there's gonna be one more test, but I don't seem to have any problem. My cardiovascular system seems to be fine, so that's not that issue. But God didn't waste a lot of time. All the trips to the doctor, and all this screwing around, and now there's I've still got more screwing around. So that takes time too, that you know, when we were young, we didn't worry about that stuff.

Roopinder 1:03:16

We have to maintain ourselves even even more and more.

Steve Wolfe 1:03:19

Yeah, you're in pretty good shape though, right?

Roopinder 1:03:23

I had a condition also that went undiagnosed for five, six years, and it turned out to be no simpler solution than just drinking a lot and lot of water, which I managed to avoid somehow. Don't ask me now. But water, water, water seems this is after a battery of tests.

Steve Wolfe 1:03:42

Yeah.

Roopinder 1:03:43

Years of testing, years of different testing.

Steve Wolfe 1:03:46

And all that stuff takes time. So, you know, that's part of you say, what are you doing in your life? Well, you know, it's a part, it's not a part that's any fun.

Roopinder 1:03:53

So you're still traveling, and you don't want to lessen your travel just because of health concerns or anything.

Steve Wolfe 1:03:59

We have a strategic plan, and and that is we're going to the difficult places while we're still healthy enough to go there.

unknown 1:04:05

Okay.

Steve Wolfe 1:04:06

There will come a time, you know, we're going to Madagascar. And there will come a time when I maybe don't want to go to Madagascar.

Roopinder 1:04:13

Oh, I'm so jealous. Madagascar, I just saw a documentary on it.

Steve Wolfe 1:04:17

Oh, yeah. Attenborough.

Roopinder 1:04:22

Yeah.

Steve Wolfe 1:04:22

Yeah, it's about two hours long. Uh great show. And uh, but there's also a fabulous book. There's a fabulous book by this guy. Uh he's a British guy named Gimlet. And he writes about the people. And um, and uh, it's called The Gardens of Mars. And the last the author's name is Gimlet, not spelled like the drink it ends in double T-E.

Roopinder 1:04:51

Okay, okay.

Steve Wolfe 1:04:52

I think it's John Gimlette. And it is one of the best travel history books about a country, period. He's a marvelous writer. You ought to read it just for the writing.

Roopinder 1:05:06

But if you're interested in Madagascar, you ought to read it and then so it's about Madagascar, not about Mars.

unknown 1:05:13

No.

Steve Wolfe 1:05:14

The Gardens of Mars are a place in Madagascar.

Roopinder 1:05:17

Oh, okay. And uh in the documentary I read, they made a big deal out of showing the bow bag trees, but that's not unique in Madagascar. That's they're ever everywhere in Africa, but they have their own.

Steve Wolfe 1:05:29

They are in the lowlands. They're in the lowlands, uh uh, you know, across Central Africa. I've seen them in uh I've seen them in Senegal, I've seen them in Zimbabwe. Yeah. Uh uh, they are around, yeah. And they're not really a tree at all. I didn't realize until I read this book that they weren't a tree. Uh they are kind of like a big, kind of like a big celery. And um uh so that that's part of it. But Madagascar is Madagascar has got all this amazing stuff because it was isolated from the rest. Of Africa for uh a hundred million years. And um, but culturally it's a very interesting place. You know, the uh the country was first the island was first settled by people who were from, they think, Borneo. Oh, and there have been, because it was a trade route to Europe, it was a place to stop and get supplies and water and you know, food and all that, it was a place to stop on your way to Europe from India before the Suez Canal was built. So it it was very important to Indians for trade routes. And so there's uh an Indian community there that's been there for a long time, you know, that that came. And and they've had some of the most horrific social problems and horrific rulers and everything else. I mean, it's just it's just a truly amazing place.

Roopinder 1:06:49

So tell me this, and maybe you can do more study of this when you get over there. Why has it not been overrun with humans? I get the impression it's still basketball.

Steve Wolfe 1:06:58

Oh no, it's being overrun with humans.

Roopinder 1:07:00

It is. Oh, it is.

Steve Wolfe 1:07:02

Yeah, yeah. They're you know, they're all very, very poor. They're having bunches of kids like farm people do and who are poor. And you know, and then the kids cram into the city, they have no industry, uh, they have a kind of a crooked government, there's no reason to be there. The government is mostly selling off their natural resources, oil and vanilla and whatever else they have. And uh, you know, the the people are killing all the lemurs and eating them. Uh and so it is uh, yeah, it's definitely being overrun. But it's not being overrun by immigrants, it's being overrun by Africans. No, they're not Africans. The the people who live around the edge are Africans. People who live along a seashore are Africans, but the people who live in the center of the country are more like people, more like Indonesians.

Roopinder 1:07:55

Really? Amazing, amazing. You realize you're not selling it as a tourist destination.

Steve Wolfe 1:08:01

No, I I think it's actually what it's a great what it's a great destination for, apparently, according to Gimlette's book, is sex tourism. Because the the French took over, and so most people speak uh French as a second language, Malagasy. Even though it has all these different cultures, it it actually has only one language. And so the French people took over, and and now everyone speaks French, and there's a big French influence there, and and it's a great place for people to go. So these these old French guys go there and they hang out on the beach and then they have sex with these young women, which because the Malagasy is thinking all right.

Roopinder 1:08:40

That's so sad. I just did not know that.

Steve Wolfe 1:08:43

I know. It's just like wow.

Roopinder 1:08:46

Yeah, yeah. So you you you and your wife both share this passion for going to off-the-beat bath, let me call it that.

Steve Wolfe 1:08:54

No, just for travel. We we did all over Europe, you know, we've done a lot of players. We haven't been to every country in Central America. We we skipped a few, but we intend to go back. Uh, we've been to the Caribbean, we've been to a number of countries in South America, been to East to Asia. We love going back. We're going back to Japan again for Christmas. We've been, you know, we've we've been to China several times, you know, a big strong desire to go back. We had a wonderful trip in India. Uh, we went to Sri Lanka. We want to see all these different places and cultures. And uh, you know, I maybe someday Mongolia, but it's like lower on my list. I said, I still haven't been to Australia yet, so I want to go there. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff to see. And um I found out probably, and I think maybe it was on our 30th or 35th anniversary. My my wife read me from her diary that she kept at the time, and you know, it she talks about how I asked her to marry me and I said, but and we'll go on a honeymoon in Europe. And if I hadn't thrown in a honeymoon in Europe, she never would have married me. So that's how close I came to missing the most wonderful woman in the world. We're we've been working with this group in Uganda that provides microloans for our grandmothers. And now we it's time for us to hand over our job as liaisons with the Niaka organization to some younger people in this group called Women's Empowerment. Uh over the relationship. Because there's there's new people over there and everything. So this is sort of our last trip there. So on the way there, we're gonna stop for a week in Saudi Arabia. We're gonna stay as far from the war as we can, you know. So we're going to uh we're flying into Jeddah, and then we're going to Medina, and then we're going to up north. There's a place where the Nabataeans built it. It's kind of like Petrov, except nobody goes there. And so we'll see a little bit of Saudi Arabia. We won't really see the heart of Saudi Arabia, which is Ryadh. And we certainly won't see any of the oil places, which wouldn't want to go to anyway. Um, and then um,

Madagascar Uganda And Writing It Down

Steve Wolfe 1:10:55

and then we're going to go to Uganda, and then from there we're going to Madagascar. So this is a five-week trip.

Roopinder 1:11:02

We just finished this novel, but it's based on history, historical fact. Uh, it's about child soldiers in Uganda and the and the Lord's Liberation Race. Uh Congo is a Heart of Darkness. You read The Heart of Darkness?

Steve Wolfe 1:11:14

Congo is a Heart of Darkness. So there, that's and I I the only place I've been in the Congo is Kinshasa, which is the capital. And so that's on uh that's on the Congo River. And that story was about going up the Congo River.

Roopinder 1:11:29

Yes.

Steve Wolfe 1:11:30

Rubber and other stuff and exploit the poor people. And um, yeah, there's a great book about the Congo, King Leopold's Ghost.

Roopinder 1:11:38

I read it. It's great, it's great and horrible at the same time.

Steve Wolfe 1:11:41

Great book. I mean, it really makes you ashamed to be a European kid with their colonies.

Roopinder 1:11:47

Absolutely.

Steve Wolfe 1:11:48

You know, that's water over the dam. It's not my fault. It's not your fault. We didn't do those things. But if we were into ancestor worship, maybe what do they call it?

Roopinder 1:11:59

White white man's guilt. I remember the pictures of the Congo, like this, only with with no hands. Like they used to take the hands off the people.

Steve Wolfe 1:12:08

No, they're they they the Belgians were monsters, the Europeans were monsters, and everywhere they went. I mean, the Germans were nasty people when they ran Tanzania, but they got kicked out a long time ago, back you know, after the First World War. And uh the Brits are like horrible people. Horrible. Um what they did to India, what they did in the Caribbean, what they did to Africa is just functional.

Roopinder 1:12:28

Steve, you're the maybe the first white person I ever heard mention uh Juneteenth. He was quite a bastard. He was quite a bastard, yes, he was.

Steve Wolfe 1:12:38

As were they all. The uh uh the Spaniards were tough people, and yet when I I used to think the Spaniards were worse colonists than the English. The Spaniards left a very deep footprint in America. I mean, when you travel through Latin America, every little town, it doesn't matter what country it is, it looks like a little Spanish town. It's got the government building at one end and the church at the other, and big trees where people come and sit around, and uh merchants around the outside. And that's a Spanish town, and it's laid out in a grid, and that was not what the indigenous people built at all. But when you look at things like slavery, the Spaniards imported to the Caribbean and probably South America, probably three, four hundred thousand, as I recall the numbers are uh slaves into the Caribbean over the entire period that they were importing slaves from Africa. The British brought three million, almost in order of magnitude, more slaves than the Spaniards did. So, and then today.

Roopinder 1:13:42

Yeah, and the Portuguese, have you heard about the Portuguese slavery?

Steve Wolfe 1:13:46

Well, the Portuguese were pretty bad guys too, but they took most of their slaves to Brazil, yeah, right. Where they actually didn't fight a civil war to end it, they ended slavery quite a few decades, several decades later, after it ended in the United States, but they didn't fight a war over it. And there's even though in general people of African descent in Brazil probably don't live as well as the people who look like Europeans, yeah. Um there isn't the hostility between the races in Brazil that you find in the United States of America.

Roopinder 1:14:22

I've heard to tell people you're Canadian. That works for Americans.

Steve Wolfe 1:14:26

Some sometimes we say that, but you tell people you're an American, how their faces light up and how glad they are to meet you. They still people all around the world, I mean, there are exceptions. Mostly people are very glad to meet you, and they want to talk with you, and they still view America as this place of opportunity. And compared to the really nasty governments in most of the world, and in Africa, the Ugandan government is less bad than a lot of them, but it's still pretty bad by world standards. And um so I think the um, yeah, the the they are, everyone's glad to see you. They like America, they like the idea of America, they like the idea of a place where people are free. It annoys me that we are becoming more and more bureaucratic, more and more European, less free, and going out and messing around other people's business.

Roopinder 1:15:22

So I get the impression you still like America, and and you're not shopping for a place to live out your ears.

Steve Wolfe 1:15:29

There there really isn't. I I've I've not found any other place I'd rather be. I went to um New Zealand a few years ago, and um I thought, well, if Gavin Newsom kicked me out of the coun out of the state, and and uh uh or Gavin, President Gavin Newsom kicks me out of the country, I could live in New Zealand.

Roopinder 1:15:47

Really?

Steve Wolfe 1:15:48

I'd probably still live in New Zealand, but I was still I after that, the way they handled COVID and all the way they made a mess of their affairs during COVID, I thought, well, you know, they're still very into authoritarianism. And so I don't know that New Zealand is the ideal place, but it's not so bad. Um the Maori are, you know, they're there's did you ever read the book? Um it's about um it's about the Polynesians, the Polynesian expansion in the Pacific.

Roopinder 1:16:20

I read a one or two books about that, yeah.

Steve Wolfe 1:16:22

Yeah, so as you know, New Zealand is one corner of the Polynesian triangle, and then uh Easter Island's the other one, and then Hawaii. And then these people came out and they they navigated by the stars without instruments, and they found all these islands. And you fly over it, you try to look for an island. We know very little about the Polynesians, just as we know very little about Native Americans, except for well, we know very little about Native Americans because they didn't have a written language. We know a great deal about countries that had written languages, we know a great deal about the Arabs, we know a great deal about the Indians, we know a great deal about the Chinese, we know a great deal about the Europeans who used their the Latin written language. We know because they wrote things down. Uh the uh Mayans had a written language, and in one day the Spaniards burned 1200 books and down went their history. Monstrous crime. Yeah. So, yeah, as we were talking about, writing is what started this whole conversation. Writing down this history is very important because if you don't write it down when it's happening, then you're just relying on the memories of old fools like you and me, and don't go there. Oh, you're young.

Roopinder 1:17:46

You're doing your part. You're recording your travels, you're recording, you recorded the cat cat history quite a bit, almost quite a bit of it.

Steve Wolfe 1:17:53

But now we have now we have to save it. Now we have to have it available, we have to make it available as part of this total sum of human knowledge, which is just extraordinary. And we have that all accessible easier through queries and stuff like that.

Roopinder 1:18:08

Steve, it's been wonderful talking. I wish we could talk more. It's been great. Thanks so much for agreeing to be on and talking. Okay. All right, and I'm glad to have preserved some of your legacy, at least in our conversation. But I hope the rest of it appears.

Steve Wolfe 1:18:24

Well, I hope I hope so too.

Roopinder 1:18:25

So I'll let you go. Take care. Say hello to Jeanette for me.

Closing Thoughts And Goodbye

Roopinder 1:18:30

Bye-bye. Okay, all right. Have a good rest of the day. You too.

Steve Wolfe 1:18:33

Have a good rest of your day.

Roopinder 1:18:35

Thank you. Bye-bye. This concludes this episode of the History of CAD podcast. Please join me at our next episode as we add to the rich history of design software. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or know someone who has stories to share, please let me know via email at roopinder at engtechnica.com.com slash sponsorship.