A brief history of rearchitecting AutoCAD (or the importance of R13)

Over the weekend I received an email from Jürgen Becker. It came with this image, which certainly brought back memories.

AutoCAD Release 13

The email referred to our recent trip down memory lane

I read your last post and remembered a poster. Do you remember that release, it was terrible?

This is one of my favourite “chat over a beer” topics, and one that seems relevant to where we are today with Fabric, so I wrote Jürgen a quick note to say that I’d reply via my blog. Here is that reply.

R13 was bad, but it had to happen

I joined Autodesk in August 1995, which was about when the R13 release had stabilised (I have some recollection of c4 or c4a being released soon after I joined, but I can’t track down the exact timing of the R13 point releases). So I didn’t experience the full pain caused by the quality of that particular release… while I can empathise with it, I didn’t exactly live it myself on a daily basis (like many of our customers did). If people would like to share their own…

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