Happy Anniversary to us all

Ten years ago this week I received a box from Autodesk that puzzled me. At the time I worked at an Autodesk reseller and while I frequently received packages of software to install for customers I’d never seen a box from Autodesk that was so thin. It couldn’t have been more than an inch thick and I assumed it was a book not a software package that would change my life.

 In that box was the long awaited Autodesk Inventor 1.0. A booklet less than a half inch thick accompanied a single disk and while I’d been using pre-release versions of the software it’s always exciting to see how the released product works and what changes might have been made at the end on the process. The software was simple,  and while the feature count was not as great as Mechanical Desktop or some of the other packages available at the time it was also missing was a lot of the fussiness and additional steps to get a shape on the screen.

 Fast forward to Inventor’s tenth anniversary and you’ll find that Inventor is just as (if not more) easy to use and there’s clearly been a change in its technical capabilities. Last week I did a four hour class/demo/overview for a collegiate SAE Baja team. In these four hours we covered Weldments, incredibly complex Sheet Metal, Finite Element Analysis of parts and assemblies, the always amazing Design Accelerators and discussed plastic part and Mold design with several other concepts. Even though I'd used all of these tools many times I still have to marvel at how effortless it is to carry out these tasks and how quickly the result is found. Ten years ago when I was looking at the Inventor 1.0 packaging I couldn’t possibly foresee these capabilities ever being part of the application and just a handful of years ago I would’ve doubted that they would ever be so easy. If you have Inventor and are still using the same techniques you have since you began using it take a moment to explore the tutorials and see if as a gift to yourself and a celebration of ten years of ever advancing technology you can find a new way of doing things. There are many to be found.

  To the developers, programmers and visionaries who brought Autodesk Inventor to the world I would like to say thank you and keep pushing the envelope of what people expect to be able to do. Happy Anniversary Inventor I’m sure the next ten will be as amazing as the first.