

John Walker's history of Autodesk (1994) - enkiv2
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html

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engi_nerd
I have read large portions of this in the past. I can't fathom working for a
company where one of the top executives put out such lucid, technically
correct, and interesting documents.

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brudgers
AutoCad is a truly amazing piece of software. It's Emacs for vectors,§ but in
a world where Emacs was flush with cash and could pay a full blown development
team for 30 years...oh and buy out Vim and bury its corpse out in the desert
[AutoDesk bought Generic Cadd which used a system of two letter mnemonic
commands in 1989 and killed it so dead in 1997 it doesn't even have an English
Wikipedia entry].

§ _With apologies to Stallman for comparing his baby to proprietary licensed
software._

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wlesieutre
I don't know if it's inspired by Generic Cadd, but Autodesk Revit uses two
letter mnemonics for shortcuts. MV for move, DR for door, LF for light
fixture, VG for visibility/graphics, etc.

~~~
brudgers
AutoDesk bought Revit in 2002. They were inspired by the proprietary file
format that prevents direct interop by other vendor's cad software.

~~~
wlesieutre
Hell, it prevents interop between different versions of Revit. Automatic
"upgrade" if you touch a file, and there's no way to save back to previous
formats.

But since you can't even buy a copy of Revit anymore (subscription licensing
only), I guess that no longer matters.

Anyway, I was referring to the 2-letter command system. I think Revit is the
only piece of software I've ever encountered it in.

~~~
brudgers
In so far as I recall, and I never used Generic Cadd in anger, pretty much
everything in Generic Cadd was two letter mnemonics. This was back in the days
before AutoCad had .pgp files for command aliasing and was just adding drop
down menus. The only good options for driving AutoCad with a keyboard were
either with the screen menu system that lived in a sidebar like area of the
display, or writing AutoLisp and using the bang operator on expressions.

Once AutoCad got .pgp files in R11, then two letter commands were possible...I
used "dd" for 'ddlmodes when it was different than 'layer for many years.

Anyway, Generic Cadd was one of the top PC Cadd systems when Autodesk bought
them out and then slowly killed them off. I'm not big on the Revit, I upgraded
from R14 to Architectural Desktop version 1. Revit's business model always
worried me.

~~~
wlesieutre
Yeah, now that you mention it, AutoCAD does do a fair bit of two letter
aliasing. Not quite as directly as Revit's where you just hit the letters and
don't need to press Enter.

I'm not a huge fan of Revit either. Thankfully one of my coworkers handles
most of what we have to do here (families of our products for
architects/designers to use in their projects), though I've still gotten
dragged into more than a few discussions about it. Like whether we build our
assets in an older version that more people can import but has known bugs in
the photometrics display, or if we go to the new one and then have people
coming and asking "Hey do you have these for 2011?" and having to remake it
from scratch. Ugh.

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theologic
Let us not forget John's excellent Hackers Diet.

I've been logging weight for years at www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet.

Lost around 30 pounds, which made me happy.

~~~
anonbanker
I showed the hacker's diet to my wife, and she's lost about the same amount so
far. fantastic resource.

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drallison
John's book is outstanding, a must read for everyone who is even thinking
about doing a start-up. Autodesk was an exceptional case, particularly in the
early days--but we need many more exceptions like this.

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santaclaus
Rad article. The Maya API feels like a bad experiment from 1994 sometimes...

~~~
anonbanker
Maya was created by companies unrelated to John Walker's Autodesk.

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hblanks
Who works with someone like this today?

