Our Mission

I started back in the 1960’s, the days of board drafting as a highway draftsman/designer and can remember those days of ruling pens, scratch pens and doing it the old fashion way when we had to tape our bottle of ink to the table to keep from knocking it on the floor and cleaning the pens with a rag (usually a piece of an old t-shirt) we would hang from the edge of our table. It was exciting when rapidograph pens came out and we didn’t have to keep loading the old pens with ink every minute. Yep, and I remember waiting 4 hours for an ink line to dry and sitting there blowing on the ink to speed up the drying time and I can remember how exciting it was when our company got the first HP hand held calculator. We only had one for our whole floor and I believe it cost around $800. I’m not sure of the price but we had to share it with everyone on our floor. Well, things have come a long way since then and we want to get everyone excited about the new days of technology and how autodesk has changed the world with all of their innovative products.

I can remember when autocad 1.0 was introduced and we sat there trying to figure out how to draw a line from point a to point b. It wasn’t very easy but we worked at it and as times changed and the software got easier to use it all started making some sense where this technology was going.

Of course modern day computers helped along the way. Back then we had the IBM XT and AT computers with a maximum hard drive memory of about 19 KB…. Yep thats right 19 KB and we thought that was a lot. Then people started talking about Megabytes and we couldn’t believe it. I had the first computer upgraded to a 1 MB hard drive and I was the envy of everyone in the department. It all seems funny now but as the senior highway designer that was my perk. Now 1 MB is a drop in the bucket compared with the 250GB hard drives of today. Now they are talking about TB Terabytes. Amazing suff that blows my mind.

There were some positives about the old slow computers. When we got DCA civil engineering/survey software and the surveyors would bring the info. back from their data collectors and I had to download all the points they collected and insert them into the drawing this could take up to 8 hours and all I had to do was sit there and watch the points come up on the screen… very slowly … I didn’t mind, especially working overtime on saturdays and getting time and a half for watching and there was nothing I could do to make it go faster. I had to sit and watch it because it locked up many times and I’d have to start over…. no problem there since I wasn’t paying me and this was high-tech at the time and just the way it was.

If you watch the videos you’ll see that autodesk now has software that will render architectutal models in seconds. Unbelievable software that has revolutionized the industry. Of course we are not trying to sell software here as much as helping each other with the changes in the industry.

The negative part is, in these times of company downsizing, massive layoffs and the high costs of living many CAD Operators, Technicians and Engineers are finding themselves in a position where they either have to find a new job, take on part time work or open their own business.

The mission of the ACAD TEAM is to help them achieve their goals by bringing them together to discuss these problems, learn new skills and find employers who have work right now.

Good luck in whatever your goals are.

The ACAD TEAM