The epiphany occurred in the spring of 1983 when a long forgotten sales rep appeared in my office with a Victor 9000 and a license of AutoCAD 1.2.

At the time I was the Department Head of water resources at AESL (Associated Engineering) in Edmonton Alberta. I had relocated the family from the warmer but gloomy suburbs of Toronto to the sunny but admittedly crisp suburbs of Edmonton in 1979 to join AESL . My attraction - AESL was the first engineering firm in Canada to acquire a CAD system from M&S Computing – later renamed to Intergraph).

Alberta was in the midst of the 1970’s oil boom and was an engineer’s dream with major project following major project. The CAD system was revolutionary but was largely an electronic pencil. It had some major benefits but was extremely difficult to justify economically. Basically it had to run 24/7 to cover capital and operating costs.

The system was configured with 4 workstations in Edmonton connected via a high speed (9600 BAUD) connection to 2 workstations in Regina. I can’t recollect the exact architecture of those systems but local work must have been cached in memory because whenever one of the 6 users had to perform a “regen” – everyone went for coffee. This was your classic closed system – you sent in requests and drawings appeared but there was no engineering design capability.

In an attempt to demonstrate how CAD could be used as part of engineering design, I had assembled a ragtag crew of rebels into my department and had assumed fiscal responsibility for one of the workstations. We were managing the pre-design phase of a regional sewer system and I wanted an automated system that would allow me to examine pipeline re-routes in close to real time. With 63 numeric layers and no attributes, we were marginally successful in evaluating the impact on pipeline length; automated profile generation was still a tedious manual process.

The Victor 9000 sat on my desk. It had an amazing 800x400 screen resolution, two 5 ¼ inch floppy drives, an 8088 chip and a stunning 128 KB of memory – even better it could be mine for around $5,000. As a bonus AutoCAD offered unlimited named layers.

AutoCAD 1.2 also had an import function using a text file in a DXF format – documentation was a bit scarce but I was able to provide the specifications to the AESL programming team and within a day, we had the Intergraph data imported into AutoCAD.

The implications had my head spinning (driven home by the realization that I had just recently approved a $250,000 upgrade to the Intergraph system to upgrade to an early VAX system).

It was time to put AutoCAD and the Victor 9000 to a test.

One of the biggest problems we were facing at the time was uploading survey data from the field to the Intergraph System. AESL programming staff had programmed what was affectionately call the “brick” – used primarily for store inventory purposes – to collect field survey notes. The information was transmitted by phone back to the office every night and used to automatically draft the survey data in the Intergraph system…. But field crews could not review their data independently – minor survey input errors caused conflicts with the engineers who were using the drafted documents for design purposes. Allowing field crews to review the data in the field, make corrections, create their own drawing and add notes before the data was transmitted made a lot of sense.

So I wrote up a spec for the system and submitted it to computer services for a quote. Clearly computer services had bigger fish to fry because the quote came back at over $100,000 and the project was killed by the executive review committee.

Never one to take no for an answer, I went looking for a client with the vision to support the project – and so the journey began.