If I'm recalling correctly, AutoDESK was the name of what was to be the central product of a startup company of the same name, many years ago. It was intended to be THE interface to a computer, sort of like Windows is/was, but it appeared much earlier.
AutoCAD was but one element of that interface. ... and the only one that sold in any volume.
ISTR that AutoCAD was a mature product, and the AutoDESK product was no longer available for sale, when Windows was announced in 1983. As is the nature of software marketing, Windows didn't actually ship until 1985 or so.
Mike: Any ideas what else AutoDESK did, besides CAD? Was it just a complete OS for drafting and that's it? About to read the link posted, since this sounds like an interesting story.
B+W Engineering and Design | Los Angeles Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer
I've never seen AutoDESK in person, but reading about it over the years has led me to believe that it had a desktop metaphor, with folders, clock, calendar, all that stuff, before Xerox PARC invented the same thing,
before Apple invented the same thing, and
before Microsoft invented the same thing.
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.
LISP is not the most readable, though I found vast improvements when using Notepad++ with the color-matching of parenthesis and ability to 'collapse' sets. It's also entirely dependent upon the author's organizational skills but that isn't unique to LISP.
I rather liked it.
It's my understand it was also the foundation for a lot of A.I. research. Possibly because of how lean it could be with hardware? I don't know anything about it - a friend who does know about such things told me about that when I was ranting about being 'Lost In Stupid Parenthesis' one day. He didn't think anyone outside of A.I. used LISP until I told him about it's tie-in to AutoCAD.
