In 2007 I met with Autodesk founder John Walker at his home in Switzerland for a discussion about the 25th anniversary of AutoCAD. We discussed a lot, mostly about early Autodesk and AutoCAD history. We got on the topic of comparing his days writing early AutoCAD code and the current AutoCAD development. John asked how large the source code in lines was in the current release of AutoCAD which was AutoCAD 2008 at the time. I answered John with “close to 12 million lines of code” and he had a look of disbelief and said “when he wrote code for AutoCAD it was only a few thousand lines” and “I can’t imagine working in that large of a codebase.” That was a funny moment, but made sense given it had been many years since John had wrote code and perhaps since the 1980s and many features and more had been added since. The early AutoCAD releases didn’t even have the UNDO command yet. Back in those days you had to exit the drawing without saving to UNDO your changes. The list of commands was so short you could memorize them all or almost count on your fingers and toes. I still run AutoCAD 2.18 on my laptop in a virtual machine for fun and nostalgia.
What do you remember or are curious about in the early days of AutoCAD?
