First Steps Toward BIM; A Personal Recollection

A Matter of Translation

I began my journey into the world of computers and technology in the early 1990’s.  CAD platforms were duking it out for market share, and the tiny company I was working for (doing wetland ecology) had a seat of AutoCAD; no one was using it.  In fact, the drawings and accompanying documents we produced were a combination of ink on mylar and MS Word. 

The main drawings were done with technical pens.  They came in various widths, and you could produce some very cool drawings using them.  Text was produced by typing out descriptions and phrases, transferring them to adhesive backed semi-transparencies, cutting/splicing text and finally peeling the adhesive back then sticking it to the mylar.  We used blue pencil to create layout lines for the text (a light line drawn in blue would not show up on the print).  Once the drawing was complete, the last step was to send the whole thing through a diazo machine which produced a “whiteprint”; a contact print that is a black and white print of a graphic that does not reverse the tones.  A blueprint is a contact print that reverses tones with white lines on a blue background.

Producing text as described above was a matter of the need for speed.  I came out of school when the transition away from handwriting was already occurring.  My own handwritten text was atrocious.  My brother on the other hand had started in his teens patiently practicing the art of hand lettering.  His hand printed text was very neat and consistent.  He frequently printed directly on mylar.  There still are many architects and landscape architects out there that have great hand lettering skills.  In spite of this, the discipline of writing by hand is almost lost.  When industries began to transition from hand made drawings to digital drawings, there was a huge demand for fonts that mimicked hand printing.  Hand.shx is still available in base AutoCAD while CityBlueprint is a Windows based True-Type font that is available in both AutoCAD and Revit.  In the end, using printed text blocks on semi-transparency was the only way a person like myself could produce a drawing in a reasonable amount of time.

We didn’t use a separate title block sheet.  We just drafted right on top of the preprinted mylar with the banner.  In “systems drafting” (done in large offices doing much more complex drawings) layers of semi-transparencies were stacked together and sent through a diazo machine to produce a single drawing.  A pin bar was attached to the top of a drafting table so that the pins fit into holes in the mylar.  This allowed for accurate alignment of semi-transparencies.  You combined and shuffled the mylar drawings to achieve varying levels of tone.  For instance, an architect’s floor plan would be stacked under an mep’s electrical drawing making it slightly fainter in the final print (this is the conceptual basis for xreffing in CAD and linking in Revit).

Corrections and revisions were made to the text by removing the transparent adhesive backed text and replacing it with new prints.  Drawings were changed and updated by erasing the ink from sections and redrawing.  Koh-I-Noor produced a special eraser that you could load different eraser bodies into for different applications.  I remember the erasers we used on the mylar were yellow.

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AutoCAD a First Degree of Separation

I was intrigued by the thought of what was possible using AutoCAD and a computer, so I focused on learning the software and the operating system.  My first efforts were pretty gnarly, but eventually, I gained ground and experience and produced a few descent drawings with little supervision and no training. 

One of my first efforts in AutoCAD, I believe Release 11

I took a course in AutoCAD eventually and frankly found that I knew more already than was presented in the course.  However, I did get access to a large format printer for the first time.  It was again, heavily influenced by hand drafting.  The printer had a carousel mounted on the top which had rapidograph pens in slots.  Several of the pens were filled with black ink but had different nib widths and there were a few loaded with color ink.  This is when I truly understood the relationship between using layer color in CAD and associating it with pen width because that was how the system was set up.  The carousel would travel and place ink as the paper in the bale moved under it.  It would change nib width (pens) based on the color of the line in AutoCAD.  Since one pen printed at a time, several passes were required to print and entire sheet.  This took a long time.  It was like watching a big mechanical dance.

AutoCAD back in those days was distributed on CD-ROM and came with a physical manual (eventually Autodesk tried to sue an individual for selling a copy of a CD with an older version of AutoCAD on it; this lead to the licensing systems we have now).  It also was Windows based and even Windows was in flux.  I started using AutoCAD when you had to “shell out” of Windows and enter CAD via the command line.  This is when having decent typing skills was essential.  Although a menu of pulldowns was available in AutoCAD, definitively, the fastest way to work was to enter commands from the keyboard.  To this day, when I work in AutoCAD, I use the command line (keyboard entry).

My AutoCAD Release 14 Manual; the binding was taped after falling off from overuse.

Eventually, I got a position at a company called EDAW.  It has since been absorbed by AECOM.  I still wanted to learn more about AutoCAD and computer technology in general, but in those days most of us didn’t have access to the software at home (I remember that a seat of AutoCAD was around $400 at the time).  I usually took the bus to and from work, so I brought the printed manual with me and would study it on the bus.  This worked well, because I would read about a tool or concept, then when I got to the office, I would practice whatever I had studied for a few minutes before I got to the work of meeting a deadline.  This is how I learned about blocks and about attributed text.  It allowed me to quickly summarize quantities (something that a lot of people were still doing by counting symbols on printed drawings).  I just kept saying to myself, there must be a better way; there was!

Autodesk hadn’t established itself as the de facto CAD platform.  Some of my colleagues had both AutoCAD and Bentley MicroStation installed on their PC’s.  They used them interchangeably; at least that is what was reported.  In conversation I learned that with very few exceptions, everyone really focused on one application.  EDAW did eventually adopt AutoCAD as the only CAD platform.  The MicroStation users weren’t very happy about that.

I think if I had to “define” it, I would say that CAD is the digital equivalent of “systems drafting”, where layered drawing information is combined with text to create many kinds of drawing and documentation.  Because it was (and is) computer based, it provided other options and tools that you wouldn’t have thought about as a standard part of the traditional building design arts (architecture, landscape architecture and engineering).  Through AutoLISP you could “automate common” tasks, create custom tools and improve productivity.  Blocks may have been the AutoCAD translation of graphic symbols, but they were storehouse to so many more points of data.  You could (and still can) build entire schedules of items if you have blocks set up to do so.  Improved tools and new tools became the focus of software providers (they still are).  And so it was that I began following the industry trends and the very human drive for the new best thing.

AutoLISP In Plain English by George O. Head and Inside AutoLISP by Smith & Gesner; 2 books I used to learn AutoLISP