I wasn't old enough to drive a car, but I remember such things. This was a far cry from the nearly $2 billion in annual revenue the company would generate several decades later.And ACAD version 9 or so. Sales during that first year ending Januwere $14,733 and the company lost $9,465. It would eventually be combined with other features and sold as ADE-1 (short for AutoCAD Drafting Extension). A dimensioning package was being developed that was to sell for an additional $500. Sales continued to be fairly slow until a new Intel 8086 version, written in C and called AutoCAD-86, was released in January 1983. The first revenue copy of AutoCAD was sold to Jamal Munshi, the president of MOMS Computing in Sausalito, California. Several other vendors (Sierra Data Systems, Sun Flex, and Victor demonstrated AutoCAD in their booths and the software was awarded “best of show.” For a while, the Victor 9000 version was the most popular, because the Victor had the highest resolution screen of any PC, 800 by 400, and dual, high-density (1.2MB) floppy drives were standard. This initial version of AutoCAD consisted of approximately 12,000 lines of source code. This early version of AutoCAD proved to be one of the hits of the show. Another company had appropriated the MicroCAD name sometime after the West Coast Computer Faire and before COMDEX, necessitating another name change. The CAD software shown at that conference was AutoCAD-80, so named because it ran on machines powered by either the Zilog Z80 or Intel 8080 microprocessor. First AutoCAD versionsĪutodesk participated in COMDEX in November 1982. Yet most of the original INTERACT commands still work in current versions of AutoCAD. Today’s AutoCAD bears little resemblance to INTERACT. INTERACT was rewritten in the C language, to run on the new IBM PC, and was rechristened–first as MicroCAD, and then (when the MicroCAD name was sniped by another company) as AutoCAD. In late 1981,Walker, Drake, Riddle, and about a dozen other people, came together to co-found what, in January 1982, would become Marinchip Software Partners, and shortly thereafter, Autodesk. When Walker saw INTERACT running on the Marinchip Systems computer, he was impressed enough to become a dealer for the software. Marinchip Systems, owned by John Walker and Dan Drake, made an S-100 main board with a TI TMS-9900 processor that fit the bill. Ultimately, he decided he needed a processor that could support hardware multiply. He was slowed down by the state of hardware at the time - he had to write the program in pieces, and assemble it as larger memory boards became available. He wrote INTERACT in his spare time, starting in 1977.
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