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As told by Ralph Grabowski
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BricsCAD did not develop in isolation. It is the result of the rich history of CAD, some of which was the result of a black-swan event.
Black swans are events that are completely unexpected. They cannot be predicted. They are named after the rare occasion when a black cygnet hatches from white parents. The idea is that the unanticipated event significantly changes the course of the future -- different from what we had expected.
Here are some examples:
- 9/11 was a Black Swan event.
- The launch of the iPhone was a Black Swan event.
- The emergence of IntelliCAD was a Black Swan event.
Not all of history is affected by black swans. Some of the history preceding and following the emergence of BricsCAD was entirely predictable, the result of logical steps that proceed as people advance technology.
BricsCAD came about from three strands of history, about which I will tell you.
First Strand: IntelliCAD
IntelliCAD is important to the history of CAD. People involved the early days of IntelliCAD had no idea what was going to happen. They had one idea that mutated into another one, very different over which they had no control. Let me describe the history that needed to take place before IntelliCAD could emerge.
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The story in Holland begins all the way back during the late 1980s. A Dutch marketing wiz by the name of Vince Everts built up his company using hard work and brilliant ideas. His company, Cyco Automation, invented the very first DWG viewer. I’ll talk more about this during the second strand of history.
  Ground-breaking software from Cyco that would change the course of CAD history: AutoManager and AutoManager WorkFlow - - -
Now let's jump from Holland to the east coast of the USA. An engineer by the name of Dave Arnold had been building up his local civil engineering firm into the largest third-party developer in the AutoCAD world. When he saw how badly Autodesk treated a top developer like Cyco, he wondered if Autodesk might one day see his Softdesk company also as a threat.
So he had a skunkworks set up on the other side of the continent, in San Diego, where a team began writing a clean-room copy of AutoCAD. This is permitted by US law.
Then a whole bunch of stuff happened in rapid succession, and some of it is still not clear to this day, as the people involved remember things differently.
It began when Autodesk wanted to buy Softdesk, perhaps to counter a threat from Bentley Systems, whois very strong in the areas of civil engineering and roadway design. As part of the disclosure process, Mr Arnold had to reveal his secret project to Autodesk. It was called IntelliCADD -- with two Ds.
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Up in Seattle, Visio was a big company making diagramming software. A manager who was a former Autodesk employee, got wind of Phoenix. He told me that he alerted the US Federal Trade Commission that Autodesk came to own an AutoCAD competitor and might try to quash this nascent upstart competitor. At some point, Softdesk spun off the skunkworks as an independent company named Phoenix, as its programmers hoped their software would one day rise again. After some deliberation, the FTC ordered Autodesk to leave the Phoenix software and its staff alone for five years. This gave Visio the opportunity to purchase it.
Visio first named it Project Phoenix, and then launched it as IntelliCAD 98. It was priced at exactly 10% of the cost of AutoCAD. I helped write half of the documentation for that first release.
 The first release of IntelliCAD
The initial release IntelliCAD had a serious flaw: hatching was not associative, which was a must-have feature at the time. And the program didn’t run as fast as Visio’s ads promised.
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Meanwhile, Autodesk fired back by launching their TrueDWG campaign. It was successful in sowing doubt about the reliability of using non-AutoCAD software. On top of that, they acquired technology that allowed them to create Actrix Technical diagramming software to complete directly against Visio Technical.
In the end, Visio sold only tens of thousands of copies of IntelliCAD. Executives began to lose interest. It had cost them $25 million to buy and develop and market. Around this time, Microsoft was getting interested in buying Visio for its diagramming software. Microsoft asked Visio to get rid of IntelliCAD as a condition of sale, and Visio was happy to do so.
After this, Autodesk lost interest in Actrix, and pulled the plug on it. Users were orphaned. Twenty years later I still get requests to translate AXD files to DWG. Some of the technology made it from Actrix into dynamic blocks.
(An insider told me the story of how Microsoft and Autodesk dropped their competing products at roughly the same time, but as it is from a single, second-hand source, I won’t repeat it here.)
The manager at Visio wanted to keep IntelliCAD as a thorn in Autodesk’s side. If he couldn’t sell it, he would give it away. VIsio set up the IntelliCAD Technical Consortium and then licensed the IntelliCAD 98 code to them. Microsoft to this day owns the original code. The ITC has since rewritten IntelliCAD so that it no longer contains any code owned by Microsoft.
The idea behind the ITC group was that its members could collaborate on developing the code -- which they did. Members would be allowed to sell custom versions of the software, preferably not competing with each other. In the end they did compete with one another, driving down the price and leading to tensions among members. In more recent years these problems have been ironed out.
The first out of the gate was CADopia, developed by Surya Sarda, one of the original IntelliCADD programmers. In one of the many twists of this story, a few years ago a problem occurred between him and the ITC, and so he switched the CAD engine to the one sold by Graebert of Germany.
Two decades later, the ITC operates with 20 members listed on its Web site. A lot more firms use the code, usually for CAD programs that are used internally.
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One of the early members of ITC was a Belgium company by the name of Bricsys. It was looking for a way to get back into the CAD game after it sold its Tri-forma architectural software to Bentley Systems.
 Written by Bricsys, sold by Bentley
Meanwhile, I adapted my AutoCAD books for IntelliCAD. One of them was for new users and the other on customizing the program. Several ITC members asked me to customize the books for them. Bricsys was one of them. The first one I did was Customizing BricsCAD v4 in 2003.
As the years went by, Bricsys became somewhat frustrated at the pace of IntelliCAD development, and so with BricsCAD releases 8 and 9 it rewrote all the code so it could be independent of the ITC. And it wanted to move in directions the ITC wasn’t moving. To make the divorce smoother, Bricsys offered its new code and bug fixes to the ITC.
Since then, the biggest development in the history of BricsCAD was when Bricsys acquired the constraints technology and staff from LEDAS of Novosibirsk in Russia. This gave Bricsys constraints technology without having to license it, and a whole raft of brilliant programmers who have been working on remarkable new functions in the CAD program.
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This was slow-moving Black Swan event that took just over a decade to develop:
The first strand of history
We see
- Dave Arnold having no idea as to the effects of his insurance project
- The manager at Visio unleashing something that became much, much broader than what he originally figured on doing
- Bricsys starting with IntelliCAD, then writing their own CAD engine
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Next time: The second and third strands in the history of Bricsys.
[This paper was first presented at the Australasia BricsCAD Conference, held earlier this year in Melbourne.]
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Spin Doctor of the Moment
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"The model is absolutely sustainable"
- Dara Khosrowshahi, ceo, Uber, on his company's $5.2 billion in losses during April - June this year. |
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