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Autodesk is publicly traded on Nasdaq (ADSK).

1 History

Autodesk featured AutoCAD (formerly named MicroCAD) at COMDEX in 1982. Initially AutoCAD was written for multiple operating systems, focusing on the CP/M architecture, but also made a branch for [DOS]] and Unix.

The company's ultimate goal was to achieve a major software brand ( AutoCAD) running upon IBM's recently born PC platform. Thus, its power was its weakness: a relatively mediocre CAD application (due to Intel and MS-DOS limitations those days), available on a widespread platform. It made a CAD tool, good enough to create detailed technical drawings, possible and affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies.

The further versions and implementations (Release 2.1 introduced a new (for those days) concept in CAD and software industry: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in Lisp interpreter with a custom dialect of the Lisp Language: AutoLisp, customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers.

This brought as a result the "evolutionary" growth of a large collection of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform (as a operating system one could say). Since then, Autodesk has profited greatly from these developments by buying the cutting edge companies that made major improvements to its software. These companies' code is then brought into the Autodesk codebase where it can be retooled for use in new products.

Since Release 12, the company abandoned the Unix environment, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve superior performance in the Windows operating system.

Now AutoCAD lies back as a basement- CAD multi-purpose solution, for a great catalogue of vertical specialized solutions that constitude, in fact, whole CAD packages by themselves with its own terminology, interfacing standards and also "learning curve". It is the de facto standard non-specialized CAD solutions and its file formats " DXF" and " DWGDWG (pronounced drawing is the default extension used by Autodesk for its AutoCAD drawing files in MS-DOS and Windows. Since 1982, along with its ASCII variant, DXF, the DWG format has become the de facto standard file format for CAD applications. Since t" are the most common for CAD interchange.

Auodesk has now ventured into the world of midrange 3D CAD with the introduction of Autodesk InventorA 3D CAD modelling package produced by Autodesk of America. Complex and can prove difficult to learn for some-one used to 2D drawing techniques (such as AutoCAD). see: Autodesk. [1] and Autodesk Revit [2]. Autodesk's largest competitors in this category are Solidworks, owned by Dassault, and Pro-E, owned by PTC.