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posted 09/14/06 by Anthony Governanti Code names – The early years of Civil 3D

Ok, you’re back again, which means you are either really interested, and I have a captive audience, or you stumbled onto this page while searching for a license key for that old version of DCA you found in the back of the desk drawer. Either way, this will be the third and final segment of the Civil 3D history lesson, as told by Da Govna.

We pick back up on our timeline in the early 2000’s when LDT was quickly growing into a strong contender in the Civil Engineering CAD market. About this time is when I became a member of the Autodesk family. Up to this point, i was working in the industry, but quickly grew tired of the “move-copy-rotate” routine of the typical CAD tech in my area, and after a couple job changes in a very short time, was lucky enough to land a job in Support at the ’Desk.

Man, this was cool; to walk the hallowed halls of the mother ship – where it all began. Unfortunately they kept us Support techs pretty confined to our desks, with a chain cleverly disguised as a phone head-set. Every now and then I’d fake indigestion or a bad cough and could slip away from the phones long enough to roam the halls of the development areas. It was here that I’d overhear weird conversations that didn’t make a lot of sense, mainly because they were speaking in a tongue few outside of the walls of Autodesk can speak. I later found out that this odd dialect of English was know as “code names” and was practiced by an indigenous species of programmers who seldom saw the light of day, but when they did, would use these code names to confuse and startle the enemy so as to not give away any secrets of what was waiting in the wings and was to soon be unleashed to the public!

The first code name I was aware of was Olympus; this was the first time you had an installable product that could create data, manipulate objects, create a design, and stuff like that. Then shortly after that it was renamed to better align with our Mapping brethren to Vine (a play on words, since the Map being developed was code named Hollywood, and the overall project of for the two applications was called Crossroad – so that when and if the products were built together, you’d have Hollywood and Vine. Pretty clever huh?! (insert sound of crickets chirping here)).

So Vine was slated to be the first release of this thing that had been nurtured along and growing in the shadow of LDT for a couple years. One problem though – its gotta have a name! Well, that part has been covered by James already, so refer to him for that story; bottom line; Civil 3D was the choice that was made, and Civil 3D it would be. That brings us to the fall of 2003, and the first release of Autodesk Civil 3D; it could have been a fairly momentous event, the only downside is that we choose to release it as a preview of the product. What does that mean? Well a preview is a chance to get an application into the he hands of our customers without charging any money for it (hmm, giving away software – what’s so hard about that – well its something that the government and the SEC has made very difficult to do if you are a publicly held company) and allow users to get their hand on it and start to put it to the test.

We had a lot of great feedback in those days, and I personally had a lot of fun showing 2004 to eager audiences (I became an Applications Engineer wit the Civil sales team at Autodesk at about the same time) to give a glimpse of what was coming down the pipe. Anyway, the preview lived for about a year, and if my memory serves me right, I even think we had a Service pack for it. Then in October of 2004, we released the first commercial version of Civil 3D, code named Dozer - I think a much more apt name considering it’s a program that deals with moving dirt, but the real reason for the name was the movie The Matrix. All the AutoCAD based product were given a code name after characters from the movie.

We had Neo (AutoCAD), Trinity (Map), Tank (LDT/CV/Surv) and some others that I can’t remember. Anyway, since I was a huge fan of the movie, I was quite pleased with those code-names.

So Dozer was much more of a momentous event; at least for us here at Autodesk, and for a bunch of subscription customers who received the first shipment just in time for the holiday season. This was also the beginning of some really fun times for me; I used to demo LDT to audiences, and right in the middle, would switch over to Civil 3D and show them some parcels being edited graphically, and let them watch all the annotation and table automatically update! That was cool – but the best reaction I received was when you would change the scale of the drawing, and all the labels would automatically resize – that always got the biggest oohs and ahhs – even from the project managers and owners in the room! Anyway, I digress again, but I can’t help getting a little nostalgic.

Soon, and I mean very soon, we then released Macallan (Civil 3D 2006) and for any Scotch drinkers out there, I think you can see where the motivation behind that code name came from. It was April of 2005, and in just a mere 6 months, the Manchester crew, along with an extended team in China, was able to turn around a full release of the software and still include some great new functionality. This is probably where most of you starting becoming aware of Civil 3D as more then just some experiment by Autodesk, but as a real-world engineering application. This is when I made the move over to my current position in marketing for the Civil team, and again really started to have a blast. I was one of a handful of folks who taught a Civil 3D based class at AU that year, and was enjoying touring the globe training our internal sales staff and partners on how this thing worked.

One more year in the books, and that brought us to where we are today – Fenway (Civil 3D 2007) so named after a great run to the World Series by the Red Sox (who play at Fenway park in Boston MA for those not up on America’s favorite past time). Well that’s it, your brief, or not so brief history lesson on Civil 3D and how we got to where we are today. I hope you enjoyed the tale, feel free to ask questions or post comments if you like, and thanks for tuning in!

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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