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Sunday, October 23, 2005

Autodesk Founder Dan Drake Interviewed on PBS NerdTV

The seventh program in Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV series on PBS is an hour-long interview with Autodesk founder Dan Drake, which provides an excellent view of how the software industry has changed over the years since Autodesk got started in 1982, and how companies change as they grow. This is a must-see for anybody interested in the history of Autodesk and AutoCAD, or in the evolution of the desktop software industry. I'll confess to having forgotten the significance of the number 59030; thankfully Dan hasn't!

The interview may be downloaded in a variety of forms from the link above. The full video version is a 96.5 Mb MP4 file which can be played with Mplayer/GMplayer on Linux or the free Apple QuickTime Player for Windows. Presumably Macintosh machines are able to play such files out of the box. If you don't require video, a 13 Mb MP3 audio file is available, as well as a text transcript.

Posted at October 23, 2005 20:37