Pepperidge Farms remembers

I remember back in the day…this would be back around ’93 or ’94 when I was first learning this stuff…Windows 3.1 was the cool new thing, and AutoCAD came out with v12 for Windows…the first Acad system with a GUI….maybe a year before this, my buddy R, wqho worked at the same company…I was office manager at the time, he was the drafter…he gave me a copy of AutoCAD v10…dos-based…to play around with and learn something.

Anyways…when we got that slick new copy of v12 with the groovy GUI it also came with an add-on program the big wigs deemed us worthy of receiving. It was called Advanced Architecture, by a company named Eagle Point…just extruded lines and simple surfaces at the time but man was that advanced!! It was the first 3d modeling autocad-based platform and it is what I learned architectural drafting in plan review on…which is not really the point here.

R left for greener pastures and I took over the engineering office and my career began…I had no idea…but R would stop by the office quite often (I was still in desparate need of learning after all!) and we would have our bull sessions about cad and how to make AutoCAD do my bidding…of course he was old dos-based v10 and I was the shiny new win-based v12, but the commands are still universal to this day.

One of the things we would dream about…so many conversations loosely based around the cutting-edge (at the time!) 3d modeling Eagle Point software I was using daily…was the idea that…some day…we would be able to walk around our designs in 3d and actually work in that environment. I can still picture him, arms pantomiming as he erected walls and doors and windows before us in an unrealized 3d space only he could seem to see, but I believed him, oh yes.

R died a few years ago, before I discovered Cadsoft and Envisioneer…but I know he would have loved it.