Saturday, July 19, 2014

A Walk Down Memorial Lane

During the time at RTC North America a few weeks ago, the organization have set up an area called "Playground" in the exhibition hall with many of the previous Revit versions. They managed to get many of the older versions including version 1.0 installed on several computers.



This is the first time I got to play with Revit 1.0. Of course it displayed with the classic UI (pre 2010 interface). I used to work with the classic UI for a few versions before I had to re-learn the current interface. As a matter of fact, I don't quite miss the classic UI ever since I re-gain my efficiency after Autodesk improved it in v2011. However, when I saw 1.0 for the first time so up close and personal, it appeared to me like a foreign program.  


Revit 1.0 already came with many of the basic tools like wall, floor, door, window, column, roof and ceiling, etc; It wasn't as user friendly as it is now (although some tools are still clumsy). The railing tool in particular was very different than the later version (see properties dialog box at the above image). I was able to model something very quick but the tool was still very limited. Family editor was somewhat similar; I opened the "Out of the box" window family and the basic structure was already existed. Seeing how Revit 1.0 transitions to the current Revit version has definitely made me appreciate what we have as a design and documentation tool.

Last week I was cleaning up my bookshelf with some old Architecture magazines; some of them were dated back to 2001. I found one "Architectural Record" magazine with an ad that had the original Revit Technology company logo. I didn't know anything about Revit back in 2001 and the ad itself said very little about what it was; but it sure was very interesting to see Revit came a long way to become a mainstream in our industry.

Seriously, an image of a heater!? They could definitely use some help on marketing...

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