Autodesk: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Autodesk is a company founded in 1982 specializing in design software and services. Its flagship product is AutoCAD. It is headquartered in San Rafael, California in Marin County.

Autodesk is publicly traded on Nasdaq (ADSK).

History

Autodesk featured AutoCAD (formerly named MicroCAD) at COMDEX in 1982. Initially AutoCAD was written for multiple operating systems, focusing the CP/M architecture, but also made a branch for IBM+MS-DOS and Unix.

The company's best goal was to achieve a major software brand (AutoCAD) running upon IBM's recently born PC platform. Thus, its power was its weakness: a mediocre CAD software (due to Intel and MS-DOS limitations those days), but over a widespread platform. It made possible and affordable to many design, engineering, and Architecture companies to have a CAD tool good enough to obtain technical draftings. Follow this link for more details: "Number One". The further versions and implementations (Release 2.1 introduced a new (for those days) concept in CAD and software industrie: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in Lisp interpreter with a custom dialect of the Lisp Language: AutoLisp, customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers.

This brought as a result the "evolutionary" explosion of a constellation of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform (as a operating system one could say). Since then, Autodesk has profited of most of this developments by incorporating it to its own code, by means of buying the cutting edge companies that made major improvements to its software.

Since Release 12, the company abandoned the Unix environment, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve a the best yielding performance in Windows operating systems.

Now AutoCAD lies back as a basement-CAD multi-purpose solution, for a great catalogue of vertical specialized solutions that constitude, in fact, whole CAD packages by themselves with its own terminology, interfacing standards and also "learning curve". It is the de facto standard non-specialized CAD solutions and its file formats "DXF" and "DWG" are the most common for CAD interchange.

Auodesk has now ventured into the world of midrange 3D CAD with the introduction of Autodesk Inventor [1]. Autodesk's largest competitor in this category is Solidworks, owned by Dassault.