Thank you, Kent. I might not be able to tell each of you individually how much you helped me have a happy and successful career, but it's still a fact. I learned basic Autocad first in 1986. After a year of working with it full time to do minor plans and details, I found it to be nothing more than a very inefficient way to get lines on paper. It certainly wasn't faster than manual drafting. I joked (halfway seriously) about the fastest ACAD drafter still being slower than the slowest manual drafter that I'd ever worked with. Although ACAD was already dominating the recognition part of the market, it was the big guy.
On a whim, I went to a demonstration by a sales team that showed ACAD, Versacad, and DataCAD. The ACAD demo guy didn't actually draw anything at first. He simply showed a wireframe model of a jet airliner and rotated it around while discussing all of the advantages of ACAD. As his portion of the demo hit the end, some other architect asked him to draw a simple plan with a few walls, windows, doors, etc. No 3D, just 2D level drafting. It was a disaster. The amount of typing, off-setting, trimming, and general clean-up had every architect there, and there were several, almost ready to leave before the demo was complete. Remember. This was back before keyboarding was practically from birth skill like it is now.
I remember absolutely nothing about the Versacad demo, other than my noting that the blue Autocad menu with its white lettering looked better than did the Versacad menu.
The DataCAD demo was given by the same person that had done the Autocad demo so I really didn't expect much. He'd been so enthusiastic about Autocad, that I knew that he had a built-in bias. When the DCAD screen came up, I was back to thinking that the ACAD menu looked better. Then, the demonstrator showed how the "relative" tracking worked and compared it to ACAD's absolute tracking. It was as if a light clicked on that someone in the programming field for DataCAD was truly thinking about how a person usually works relative to the last point picked, not the absolute 0,0 point. Someone even asked if ACAD could do that and the negative answer wasn't welcomed at all.
Parallel lines, clean-up tools, door and windows, etc., had every architect there enthusiastically asking questions and getting every single one answered by the demonstrator. He made the comment that he'd never understood why every other CAD program required a menu or key selection to draw a line. Why else were we sitting at the computer? As far as he knew, DataCAD was the only program that defaulted to the line command and allowed for quick keys (without the subsequent enter) and those alone saved hundreds if not thousands of keystrokes for any sizeable set of drawings.
I was instantly sold. I remained after the demo to ask more about DataCAD. The demonstrator showed me a couple of things with the big ones being the macros. I'd mentioned that I was writing very, very basic Lisp routines, so he explained that the macros were similar in that they existed outside the basic program, but were instantly accessible and were for the most part, transparent. I never expected to be very proficient at writing macros, and I definitely lived up to all of my expectations. Fortunately, there were a lot of people out there that weren't as limited as I and have written some mind-boggling tools.
As for the demonstration and demonstrator; I returned a week later to purchase a copy of DataCAD and the demonstrator no longer was able to sell it. His main office had dropped the program because after a year of holding one multiple product demonstrations per month, had not sold a single copy. The architects would all rave about DataCAD at the demonstration and go back to their offices planning to return and purchase it. At the office, engineers, other architects, and second semester summer hires would all tout the wonders of Autocad without having a clue as to the advantages of DataCAD. The architect and his checkbook would then return to purchase ACAD by the wheelbarrow load. The demonstrator was mystified at how that worked.
As for me... I had to go to Dallas to get a copy, when I got there, that sales person was no longer in business. I actually called Charlottesville from the Dallas airport to buy direct which was how I ended up attempting unsuccessfully to be a distributor myself. I ended up exactly like the previous distributor in Houston with no sales after a year, but with a burning hatred for ACAD. An envious, burning hatred.
I'm still grateful for all of you that worked so hard bringing DataCAD and all of those useful wonderful tools to fruition. My life has been made better every day because of you.