Yes, that was their goal; at least, as much as what would satisfy their vision of a "business user" who was their target market from day 1. But it never really came about.
The book mentions a few such projects, but they never got the reception that AutoCAD did. Nor did AutoDesk really invest the time and resources into the side-projects.
Last night my eye fell upon the chapter about the selection of LISP as the user-programming interface language. Now that was interesting, considering their choices between Lisp, C, Basic, Fortran and Pascal at the time, as they put it. I'm not a programmer so I can't follow their reasoning, but I have written code in "all of the above" and then some. It's now all just a big mish-mash of formulas, loops and conditional statements, no matter what language of the day it happens to be. But Lisp code still stands head and shoulders above the rest at being the LEAST readable.
STF