In my 20's I started a company developing engineering and architectural add-ons in LISP for …

Great story and I can relate. In the late '80's I worked as a summer engineering intern at a civil engineering company. They assigned me to train the crochety draftsmen on AudCAD, but they wanted nothing to do with it. To paint a picture, these guys were hunching over drafting tables using pencils and erasers to draw their drawings, while chain smoking the whole time. An ash tray would be placed on the center of the drawing. Needless to say, my summer project was not a success! :-)

Same here, late 80s I took a high school drafting class and asked about the PCs in the back, the teacher said "I don't know anything about them, they have some software called AutoCAD. Do you want to take an elective and learn how it works?" It was entirely 2D and I went through all the exercises quickly. That foundational knowledge stuck with me and although it's not my job at all, I use Fusion 360 all the time at home to design parts for my self-built microscope and many other things. It's a great tool.

This is a great recollection. I was in high school in the early 80s, and I took engineering drafting because I wanted to be an engineer. It was all manual drawing lines, lettering, figuring out where to center your thing on the paper, no computers. I wonder when my school switched to CAD - I could have just missed your life story! When I got to college I was a CS major and we didn't have to do CAD or blueprints.

bro, i have a question. lisp addon for autocad is the second piece of lisp on automotive software. the first one was mathcad's addon. what's with lisp and automotive software? where and when did lisp slip into it? thanks xoxo

Generally similar story. I was in college and working part-time for a structural engineering company in the mid 80s as a manual drafter. We got a contract that required drawings be submitted in electronic (DWG) format. Because I was the "young" guy and had taken a couple programming classes, the partners asked if I was willing to learn AutoCAD and become the company's CAD drafter. At the time it was not an obvious yes answer. CAD drafting was not universally accepted as viable and people at my company, and within the industry, considered CAD as the last bastion for incompetent drafters. After I said yes the "old" veteran drafter at the company told me I was wasting my time and making a career mistake. I taught myself Lisp in order to make the most of the opportunity, and now 40 years later, the vast majority of my career has been spent inside AutoCAD, drawing and programming many, many l…

Another former draftsman here...started a new job at a civil engineering firm and was tasked with learning AutoCAD. Quickly became once of the lead CAD draftsmen in the department, as part of that I picked up AutoLISP scripting to automate a lot of work. I found I liked writing scripts so I took an introductory C programming course; I aced that. At the same time I was going to college part-time nights as an engineering major, but from my perch as a draftsman I was not really seeing a lot to love about civil engineering. I ran across an ad for a tech support job at a startup CAD software vendor, applied, and got the gig. I quit that drafting job, put away my ink pens and electric eraser, and switched to a computer science major. The rest is history, now a senior systems software engineer working on projects for NASA. So godspeed John Walker, thanks for pointing me in the direction of a 30…