Happy 25th Birthday, SolidWorks!

It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since we founded SolidWorks on December 30, 1993. SolidWorks disrupted the engineering world, taking the platform leap from UNIX workstations — which were only affordable to an elite few — to Microsoft Windows, which was available to nearly everyone.

For those of you born after the introduction of Windows, it’s worth noting that in the ancient 1980s, when I was a student at MIT’s CAD research lab, one seat of CAD could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The CAD vendor sold you not only the hardware and software as part of a “turnkey system,” but also the official computer table and chair. Not kidding. The idea of you buying software that you could run on your own personal computer was considered a fantasy.

It was also the age of desktop publishing when industry news was formatted for paper booklets in 3-ring binders rather than the Internet. Anyone remember Steve Wolfe’s influential “Computer Aided Design Report”?

I saved the October 1995 issue, which features headlines such as “The Windows 95 Era Begins” and “Move Over Pro/E: The Next Generation Has Arrived” (which was a review of the first release of SolidWorks). At the time, there were at least 100 times more PCs than UNIX workstations, noted Wolfe, so Microsoft could spread its software development costs across a much broader base of customers.

“Microsoft can afford to develop ease-of-use features that UNIX systems don’t enjoy,” he wrote. “For example, Windows lets workers check the status of a print job by clicking on an icon and reading the job queue. UNIX forces workers to memorize and type a command from the command prompt.”

Remarkable, huh? A leading technology publication is marveling over the wonders of a printer icon that you can click and get your computer to print! That’s a bit of historical context for the origin story of SolidWorks.

Skeptics told me over and over again that CAD would never work on a PC. It wouldn’t be fast enough, they said. People will never switch, they said. But you all know the ending to that story.

In the spirit of celebration of those 25 years, I’d like to share a few artifacts from my personal archives. Some of these mementos have never been publicly seen before, so you might even consider this post to be the launch of an unofficial SolidWorks Smithsonian. Time to get nostalgic…

SolidWorks Was Originally Named “Winchester Design Systems”

I love hearing company origin stories and learning how companies chose their brand names. Amazon almost was called “Relentless,” but friends of founder Jeff Bezos reportedly warned him that the name sounded too “sinister.” According to Business Insider, other names that Bezos seriously considered were “Awake.com,” “Bookmail.com” and “Browse.com.”

When SolidWorks was founded, it wasn’t initially called SolidWorks. We gave the company the temporary name, “Winchester Design Systems” so that we could take our time in coming up with a really great brand name. I picked “Winchester Design Systems” based on the fact that the company was born behind that second floor window of my 2-bedroom condo at 50 Edward Drive in Winchester, Mass.

I don’t know who lives there now, but they probably have no idea how many amazing products have come to life since 1993 because of our then-brand-new CAD system that was created there.

SolidWorks Was Almost Called “OmniCAD”

“OmniCAD” sounds like a nefarious conglomerate where a supervillain might work in the next “Iron Man” movie. “PowerCAD” sounds like a nutritional supplement you might mix in your protein shake. What you see above are some letterhead (remember letterhead?) mockups of possible company names before the emergence of the SolidWorks company name. I vividly remember hanging these potential company names on the wall of my office to test which ones felt right. When you’re brainstorming names, it’s always helpful to visualize how your ideas look in print.

Our software vision, of course, wasn’t impacted by the name we chose for the business. Perhaps in an alternative universe, “SolidWorks” would retroactively sound as odd as these names above.

I remember playing around with word fragments on a legal pad when I was at the Daratech VAR Conference in 1994 and just liking how “solid” and “works” sounded together. SolidWorks was built before the Internet existed (believe it or not), so we didn’t have to worry about whether the URL was available. As an aside, SolidWorks.com was one of the first 100,000 websites in the world, and I remember a board meeting when we actually debated the merits of investing in a website or not! You can see the original 1996 SolidWorks site here as archived by the Wayback Machine:

The Original Feature Manager Concept Sketch

No matter which 3D CAD system you use today, a Feature Manager is a standard part of its user interface — something you take for granted. But before SolidWorks, there was no such thing as a Feature Manager. There were features of course, but the only way for users to visualize feature order was to, as we observed pre-SolidWorks users doing, maintain handwritten lists of features on paper. Can you imagine doing that today? So we built the first Feature Manager, which was born in 1994 from this rudimentary concept sketch.

Who Was the First SolidWorks Customer?

There are two people who can rightfully claim to be the first SolidWorks customer. Dr. Bill Townsend, founder and CEO of Barrett Technology (a leading robotics company) was the first to give us an order for SolidWorks.

The first customer to actually pay us was Kendrick Vanswearingen, an engineer from Addison, Illinois. Just like Chinese restaurants proudly display their first dollar of revenue, I saved a copy of his check, the first check ever received by the SolidWorks Corporation.

Channeling Andy from “The Office”

Looking back, I now realize how much of a remarkably special time this was in my life — and how these moments don’t come along very often. My daughter once made me a handwritten sign quoting Andy Bernard (actor Ed Helms) from the final episode of “The Office” when he said, “I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

That’s how I feel when I look at some of these SolidWorks artifacts. I know that SOLIDWORKS is spelled with all caps now, but for this post, nostalgia demands going with the original capital “S” and capital “W.”

You’ve heard of the San Francisco 49ers and the Philadelphia 76ers, of course. I like to think of my SolidWorks colleagues and customers from 1995 or before as the “SolidWorks 95ers.” You 95ers will always be a very special group to me and each other.

To everyone who helped build SolidWorks over the past 25 years, whether you are a “95er,” joined later or are part of Dassault Systemes, I just want to say thanks again to all of you. It was an incredible ride. I hope you enjoyed taking a look back at some history.