…hands.

I deliberately reused this quote, which I had previously used in Information Letter 10 (see page ) in 1983 to express the sense of urgency I felt then about the coming confrontation between Autodesk and the entrenched, well-financed, mainstream CAD companies. Seven years later, Autodesk had prevailed over the then-giants of CAD and, in doing so, had transformed CAD from an exotic vertical market application to a rather conventional software product addressing a broad variety of users and industries. The coming confrontation, now, would be between specialised CAD companies such as Autodesk and broadly-based software vendors such as Microsoft and Borland who might view CAD as simply another product within their broadly diversified portfolio of interoperable applications. As in 1983, the inevitability of this coming conflict was generally acknowledged, but proved an inadequate stimulus to make the changes required to prepare for it.