Yesterday in the Autodesk Portland office we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Autodesk Inventor, and partied like it was 1999, when Autodesk Inventor was born in our.

A flashback to 1999 Autodesk Inventor R1 codename Rubicon

We even got Inventor R1 running for people to try their old school Inventor modelling skills. It was amazing to have all the fun conversations, wear old Inventor shirts, enjoy food and drink, and celebrate a big milestone of 20 years. The first customer ship date was September 20, 1999 and I am certain there a few of you who have been using Inventor since that data and maybe participated in the Inventor Rubicon Beta an public beta download program that I posted publicly back in 1999.

So much has changed and that provides an indicator of looking forward 10-20 years from now on how much things will change when we are in 2039 looking back. I remember trying to make pseudo surface objects like motorcycle gas tanks and exhaust pipes in the Inventor R1, 2 and 3 before we had surfaces or seeing how I could consume all the memory of my machine simply by designing a shell and tube heat exchanger tubesheet of 10 foot diameter by 1 “ thick and with 10,000 – 3/4” diameter holes cut in it.

Over the years, Autodesk Inventor has evolved into a very mature and powerful mechanical design software. Congratulations Inventor Team, you did it.

We couldn't have a celebration without getting Autodesk Inventor R1 running on a laptop and challenging employees to draw some parts.

I had challenged the team to wear their old shirts. I wore my Inventor R1 shirt thinking I had a ringer, but Mike Dickason wore both that shirt and a pre R1 Rubicon sweatshirt.

Old product collection from Kevin Schneider.

Here you see an image of the easter egg in Autodesk Inventor r1 showing many of the people on the team and contributors.

A few of the original Autodesk Inventor leadership showed up for the party.
 Scott Borduin current Autodesk CTO , Buzz Kross retired VP, and Richard Jones retired VP. It was so good to catch up and see these 3 together.

Party photos

The original signed poster of the Inventor R1 Team

Thank you to all those that helped develop Autodesk Inventor and those customers that have used Autodesk Inventor over the past 20 years! We couldn't have made this product without you. You were a vital part of the product team all along.

Also celebrating 20 years is Autodesk Vault which was another product back then but alive and kicking as a start up back in 1999.

Cheers,
Shaan