CAD Pioneer Looks Back on Ten Years of IntelliCAD

By Ronald Prepchuk
October 1, 2009

On September 29, 1999 the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium web site (www.intellicad.org) went live with source code for IntelliCAD 2000 available to anyone who wanted to become a member. Today Ronald Prepchuk released a white paper from early 1999 that was instrumental in the formation of the ITC and which has never before been publicly available.

"In October of 1998 I went to work for Visio Corporation to assist outside developers and OEMS in porting their applications to IntelliCAD 98", said Ronald Prepchuk. "Having worked with AutoCAD for 12 years as a developer and teacher I understood how it should function if it was going to be like AutoCAD. After a couple of months I was the number one reporter of bugs for IntelliCAD which should not have been considering I was not in the QA department. Although this caused some consternation among the QA staff it got me thinking about the problems and how they could be solved. I started talking with other staff members about their experiences, feelings, and what rumors they might be hearing. One thing I discovered was that it was the intention to roll IntelliCAD into Visio to make one product. Feeling that would be a disaster I set out in December of 1998 to write a white paper on fixing IntelliCAD. This was done on my own time and not part of my job at Visio as I did not want anyone at Visio to know I was working on it until it was completed. On April 15, 1999 I delivered it to Jeremy Jaech, President of Visio. It was distributed to the executives at Visio but outside of them only a few members of my department ever saw it. A couple of weeks prior to the public announcement in July of 1999 I was approached and told that Visio would be creating a new organization called the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium and that if I wanted a job there one would be available. I later became its first and only Executive Director. Ten years later it's worth taking a look at again to see where we've been and what is still relevant."

Ronald Prepchuk offers white paper on ITC. The paper titled simply "How to Fix IntelliCAD" can be found here: www.autodsys.com/ICADanalysis.pdf

About the Author

Ronald Prepchuk has been involved with AutoCAD since 1985 and with IntelliCAD since 1998. He was the first AutoCAD instructor at Mt. Hood Community College, the first Executive Director of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium, and is currently President of Autodsys, Inc. He has sold CAD systems, produced thousands of drawings in a production CAD environment, developed many CAD add-ons including AutoLINE which has been called by Cadalyst Magazine "One of the greatest AutoCAD add-ons" and which recently received the All Stars award for best products of 2008. He is also on the board of directors of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium.