Yesterday was a big day for the AutoCAD product. A multi-year engineering project – started in the AutoCAD team way back when I was part of it – culminated in its first deliverables getting into the hands (or, in this case, browsers) of customers.
The AutoCAD team has been working on a project codenamed “Fabric” for the last several years. It’s has been a huge amount of work – something I’ll hopefully get into in a future blog post – but it’s finally bearing tangible fruit. In broad strokes the work was to take the core of AutoCAD and make it cross-platform. You might consider the Big Split – work that was done ostensibly to build AutoCAD for Mac but resulted in a Core Engine that became the mechanism through which developers could run custom code in the cloud via AutoCAD I/O (now part of Forge’s Design Automation API) – to be the first phase of this effort. At the very least Fabric stood on the shoulders of the Big Split.
The Big Split was a significant…