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An Interview with AutoCAD Subject Matter Expert David Cohn How did you start using AutoCAD? I started using AutoCAD as an architect. I was working for a medium-size architectural fi rm in Memphis, Tennessee in the early 1980’s. At the time, our fi rm was doing a lot of work for the Department of the Navy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Navy informed us that in the near future, they would require all jobs to be done using a CAD program rather than using manual drafting. As the junior partner with some computer experience (I had done some programming in high- school and college and also purchased a Radio Shack TRS-80 for the fi rm and used it for doing analysis and property surveys for several Navy projects) I was charged with investigating the available CAD programs and making a recommendation as to what we should purchase. At fi rst, the only viable options appeared to be very expensive systems costing $100,000 or more. Then, I read about two CAD programs that had just been announced that ran on the small personal computers that had recently been introduced. Two of them, VersaCAD and AutoCAD, would soon be available for the IBM PC, which had recently been released. After doing some additional investigation, I recommended that the fi rm purchase a copy of AutoCAD. I based that decision largely on the fact that AutoCAD used fl oating-point math while VersaCAD relied on integer- based calculations. The fi rst version of AutoCAD I ever used was version 1.2, running on an IBM PC/XT, the fi rst PC with a hard drive. 6 www.cadlearning.com