Autodesk and AutoCAD history on the Web
John Walker
Walker, is now available on the World-Wide Web. The Autodesk File is
a history of Autodesk and AutoCAD told through contemporary documents,
from the inception of the company in 1982 through the end of 1993.
Extensive introductions and annotations weave the raw documents into a
coherent history.
This electronically-published edition is an update to the now
out-of-print 1989 Third Edition from New Riders Publishing (ISBN
0-934035-63-6). The Fourth Edition contains more than twice as much
material as the earlier book--equivalent to 900 letter-size pages--and
not only brings the history up to date, but includes additional
documents covering the earlier years discovered after the Third
Edition went to press, or previously omitted to save space.
It's all there: every Information Letter, debates about product and
marketing strategy, the coming and going of Xanadu, the public stock
offering, a complete transcript of the interview with The Wall Street
Journal which led to the Page One "Theocracy of Hackers" humour piece,
early product development logs and wish lists, design documents for
major features in AutoCAD, and even collected humour pieces and an
Autodesk Trivia Quiz (complete with answers). Appendices include
quarterly financial data, a stock price chart, and product release
dates and contents.
You'll see a company develop from a vague idea, to a group of people
meeting in a living room, through product development, launch,
evolution, and growth into an S&P 500 company with sales of more than
a million dollars a day. I chose to tell the story through documents
rather than a straight narrative for the reasons I explain in the
Introduction:
Too many business books, like histories of science, tend to
tell the story as a straightforward progression from start
to finish. Reality is never that easy. Decisions are made
in the face of incomplete and unreliable information because
they *must* be made. There's no way to tell a promising
avenue of success from a blind alley when you turn onto
it--you only find out much later. As you read through these
documents, you'll be seeing it all, and if it seems tedious
and repetitious, it's because the process of building a
company *is* often tedious and repetitious. But it's also
rewarding, and I hope that these documents also convey the
feeling of exhilaration, challenge, and accomplishment that
everybody felt as we built this company into what it is
today.
When you read these documents, you're opening time capsules
buried as Autodesk developed. The documents are presented
with essentially no editing other than that required to
convert them from the variety of document processors in
which they were written. Some irrelevant material, such as
five-year-old name and address lists, has been deleted but
no elisions have been made which rewrite history,
Autodesk has approved the release of all the documents in the book but
(unlike the Third Edition) does not endorse this book as its official
history. Having left Autodesk last April, I don't presume to speak
for the company, simply as a eyewitness recounting its history as I
lived it.
The Autodesk File can be read on the Web from the URL:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html
In addition, for those with appropriate reader software, you can
obtain complete copies of the book in either PostScript or Adobe
Acrobat format (in the latter, all cross-references, table of
contents, and index items are hot-linked) from:
PostScript:
ftp://ftp.fourmilab.ch/pub/kelvin/autofile/autofile.ps.gz
Adobe Acrobat:
ftp://ftp.fourmilab.ch/pub/kelvin/autofile/autofile.pdf.gz
These two files, both on the order of 5 megabytes, can also be
obtained from:
PostScript:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ke/kelvint/autofile/autofile.ps.gz
Adobe Acrobat:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ke/kelvint/autofile/autofile.pdf.gz
People in North America will find it much faster to copy these files
from Netcom and, by doing so, conserve transatlantic network
bandwidth.
Except as otherwise noted in a very few items in the text, this book
and its contents are in the public domain.
Enjoy!
------------------------- <http://www.fourmilab.ch/> ------------------------
John Walker, Megalon S.A. |
10, rue St. Honore | Even hand waving is limited
CH-2000 Neuchatel, Suisse/Switzerland | by the speed of light.
Internet: kel...@fourmilab.ch |