AutoCAD turns 20.0

With a history of shaping the designs of objects as varied as wine bottles and the oversized Hummer, software veteran Autodesk is celebrating its 20th anniversary as a public company by releasing the 20th version of its flagship software.

AutoCAD, a general-purpose 2D drafting program used by architects and engineers since 1982, has gotten a dynamic input tool tip in version 2006, announced Wednesday, making it possible to enter values and choose options directly using the cursor instead of the command line. Other major new enhancements include a more dynamic block feature, enabling the user to adjust one block for many purposes instead of creating new blocks, and more distinct highlighting of active objects.

Autodesk had its initial public offering in 1985 but released AutoCAD three years earlier. More than two decades is a long life span for a single product in the software industry.

"I used version 9 on Unix in school back in the late 80s," said Jay Pheng, a mechanical engineer at Laser Custom Designs LLC in Hayward, California. "Today I use version 2004."

Autodesk has averaged almost one release per year, and has changed its naming conventions since the first releases.

"It’s useful," Carl Bass, chief operating officer (COO) at Autodesk, in explaining the survival of the tool, which pioneered low-end, affordable CAD (computer-aid design). The software has ultimately wound up being used "for more purposes than ever intended."

The program is today used for the design of not only cars but also the auto factories and the robots making them. Least predicted has been its use in clothing design, Bass said.

The history of the program also mirrors the computer industry throughout the years. Initially designed for the CP/M platform, AutoCAD didn’t take off until the release of the DOS version.

"In the 90s, we supported up to 15 platforms at one given time," Bass said. But today, with the program consisting of 40 times more code than the first version, it’s available only on the Windows platform. Bass said that Autodesk receives a small number of requests for versions on other operating systems but has no plans to support any others.

Jay Pheng mainly uses AutoCAD for creating models, the files of which are then read by a CNC machine (computerized numerical control machine) that cuts the part with a laser. He estimates that he uses only 30 percent of AutoCAD’s capacity and finds the program too expensive, wishing for a simpler, cheaper version.

Pheng’s hopes won’t be fulfilled, according to COO Bass.

"We have the LT version for the casual user but no plan for other versions other than that and the professional," Bass said.

The survival of AutoCAD has not always been self evident.

"We’ve had two difficult periods," Bass said. "One was self-inflicted when we completely rearchitected the software in the beginning of the 90s. It was more expensive and took longer than we anticipated. The second time was during the Internet boom when everybody’s attention was turned away from drawing tools, or anything not related to the Internet. That has changed dramatically in the last years."

Publicly traded Autodesk is today doing well financially, ending its fourth fiscal quarter Jan. 31 with reported net revenues of US$356 million.