The Rogers Pass double tracking project and the associated Mount Macdonald Tunnel was the largest engineering project undertaken in North America at the time.  The engineering and survey division at CP Rail had a major problem with construction surveys.

Survey crews had captured the original ground cross sections.  The double tracking project had been designed and construction was underway.  Basically, CP Rail was cutting a new rail line through the Canadian Rockies lowering the rails by 91 meters.

This is no simple task when you consider the topography of the area as shown in the picture to the right.  Rod men were often scaling cliffs or hanging off cliffs to get the required survey data.

After contractor blasting, CP Rail survey staff would generate new cross-sections to calculate pay quantities… but if there was a discrepancy in the cross-sections, the difference in volume essentially went to the contractor.

Huge dollars were involved and a more efficient way of identifying and rectifying discrepancies was required.

At the time, all survey data was captured in field books. Survey crews not only captured the survey data but then manually reduced the notes and manually drafted cross sections – a time consuming process that could lead to one or more weeks passing between the actual survey and the production of the cross-sections.

The problem was further compounded by the physical effort it took to get to the construction site and set up for a new survey in rugged mountainous territory.

The first total station survey equipment was being introduced at the time. Geodimeter was an early industry leader. “The Geodimeter 140 (1981) introduced automatic electronic angle measuring, or what is known today as a total station. It also brought dual-axis compensation with automatic collimation and tilt-axis error correction. In 1981, Geodimeter offered the first Tracklight, a green-white-red light system that informed the rod operator whether he or she was on line, left of line or right of line.”

I had met with the local sales rep for Geodimeter and we believed hat the combination of the Geodimeter total station, AutoCAD, a personal computer, a plotter and some customized software to automate cross-section generation would improve survey efficiency and minimize turnaround time for cross section generation.

We jointly made a presentation to CP Rail resulting in AESL receiving a contract to perform the system integration. I was the project manager… and so the journey began.

In 1983/84 Western Canada was in the midst of the crisis created by the Canadian National Energy Program (NEP). The bottom line was that dozens of oil development projects were cancelled – the boom days were over.

AESL was only one of many engineering firms in Alberta that was in crisis. Stan Lawrence, AESL’s CFO took control to save the company. The Intergraph system was sold; the computer division was collapsed to the group maintaining the financial system; I had to lay off most of my staff or find them positions in other offices. Similar actions were taken in every department as the company moved into survival mode.

Ron Salmon was the manager of the computer services division at AESL. Ron’s position was being eliminated and I was about to lose my development team. I recommended that Ron consider setting up his own business and becoming an AutoCAD dealer.

Stan Lawrence agreed that AESL would sub-contract the development work for the CP Rail project to Ron.

With those decisions made, Rosal Systems became the first AutoCAD dealer in Alberta and one of the first in Canada.

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.

Having worked with Autodesk from the early days (AutoCAD 1.2) as a customer, developer, reseller, employee and consultant over a period of 25 years, I thought it would be interesting to share these experiences.

Between The Elephant's Toes is a chronology of this experience. It describes my personal experiences from the early years of computer aided drafting and design, digital mapping, the evolution of geographic information systems (GIS) to current web based application development.

This story will be of interest to those who:

• have worked with Autodesk as an employee, developer or reseller and wish to collaborate with their own insights and experiences
• want an insight into Autodesk's history from a partner's perspective
• are starting their own software company. Hopefully you will glean some small nugget that will assist you from my personal experiences
• have an interest in the history and evolution of GIS

Certainly I would love to hear from friends, business partners and acquaintances that I have made over the years.  Incorporating your perspectives and anecdotes will only add to the value of this collaborative effort.