Walker didn't know if AutoCAD would go anywhere. They apparently haggled to a near impasse.
In addition, Riddle wanted to retain the right to develop competing products in case Walker wasn't able to properly shepherd AutoCAD's development to its full potential. After Riddle's presentation, Walker was interested in acquiring AutoCAD for $8,000, but Riddle wanted a whopping $15,000 (at least he saw opportunities when they arrived). Riddle was introduced to John Walker by the guy who'd built his computer. He was clearly not a business man and certainly not a salesman. This original CAD system was called “Interact” and Riddle sold about 30 of them. Today Riddle's dream is almost achievable on a desktop. (By way of comparison: In the early 80s programmer David Buck was able to ray-trace a 640×480 semi-realistic image in 6 or 7 hours on the precursor to POV-Ray). His stated goal was: “To render full photorealistic, picture-perfect scenes from floating point models of reasonable complexity in 1/30 th of a second.” At the time that was thought by many to be a ridiculous goal. The problem was his CAD program needed to process more individual entities than the machine could handle all at once, so Riddle developed an innovative method of swapping parts of the problem in and out, to be worked on and combined until the solution was derived.īeing a strong believer in Moore's law, Riddle says he knew that eventually we'd have enough computing power to handle his ultimate goal, remarkably visionary at the time. (Now, desktops are 64-bit wide and are able to address billions of bytes of memory). It ran on an old F100-L bus machine with an amazing 16-bit wide memory when most machines were only 8-bit wide. Riddle started development in 1977 and worked on it for two years, getting his Computer Aided Design system operational by 1979. He dumped that one and started over, designing an interactive system. His first CAD program was actually an interpreter and we're talking 2D, at first. Think about that kind of genius for a moment: he was able to write his own high-level language compiler (SPL: System's Programing Language) when existing ones didn't suit his needs. He worked on a 16-bit processor with 64k of addressable space. Riddle, seen in his lab in Arizona, above ( photo courtesy of the DigiBarn Museum), developed his first CAD program in the 70s. It's Riddle's early innovations that set the ball rolling, and it's worth a look back to see how it all began. Autodesk has been around since the early 80s when John Walker and some of his programmer friends founded it as a small company based on their original product, AutoCAD, an early Computer Aided Design program acquired from programmer Michael Riddle.