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posted 09/08/06 by Anthony Governanti Civil 3D; A History Part Deux

So to recap where I left off; we had set of tools that started from humble roots to grow into a great civil program, an acquisition, and a couple somewhat new programs given great names that fit the TLA standard at Autodesk. These were my glory days, as I gracefully exited college with two associates degrees in hand, and that innocent and somewhat naive outlook that I was about to take on the world and do great things as a CAD Technician. Then I started working..testing dirt; so much for all that CAD training, but that's another tale for another time.

Anyway, back to the history lesson; sometime in the early days of the Autodesk/Softdesk relationship, a grass-routes effort was undertaken to develop the 'next big thing' for Civil Engineering software. Some of this effort did see the light of day, and as I've been told (unfortunately, I was out testing dirt on a hot job site in the middle of nowhere NH at the time so this is a story being retold, so please excuse the second hand information) there was a program called AEC-X.


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This was a mysterious piece of code that was shown by none other then Dave Simeone with Carol Barts at his side at some big Autodesk event back in the day. It showed an alignment being edited on the fly, and the profile built from that alignment automatically updating! Wow, that's cool stuff, but surely it must be parlor tricks or smoke and mirrors; well, yes and no. It certainly wasn't an application you could design a real project with, but then again it wasn't meant to be.It was an experiment to see what could be with the right know-how, and more importantly, with the right investment.

Now I get to the part where ADT fits in. Part of Autodesk's reason for acquiring Softdesk was for the Civil engineering software, and part of it was for the Architectural software Auto Architect. So a decision was made early on after the acquisition that investment and resources would be pushed towards the architectural side of the house first, and that investment grew into ADT, which represented a significant rework, if not a complete rewrite of the Softdesk architectural code. What this meant for us civil folks is that we got LDD (now LDT) which was a more scaled back approach at 'integrating' the Softdesk code into an AutoCAD desktop application. Several releases of ADT went by, and finally the day came to set 'those civil folks' loose on some R&D money and time! A significant effort was undertaken, and the roots of Civil 3D began to sprout from the minds and hard work of some very talented and very determined folks in Henniker/Manchester (there was a move in 2000 to a new facility in ManchVegas). This will bring us to the beginning of Civil 3D, and probably the biggest chunk of the history lesson...in my next post.

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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