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Thursday 7 January 2016

The History Behind Revit

This is an entry for the true Revit junkies out there. We will learn about the How, What, Where and Who of the Revit program - From 1997 to February 2002, when the founding company was purchased by Autodesk.


"SAN RAFAEL, Calif. and WALTHAM, Mass., Feb 21, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK), the leading design software and digital content company, today announced its intention to acquire Revit Technology Corporation, a Massachusetts-based developer of parametric building technology for building design, construction, and management, for $133 million cash. The addition of Revit software complements Autodesk's existing family of building industry applications with a parametric building modeler for customers to design, coordinate, and integrate information about an entire building. The closing of the acquisition is subject to governmental and shareholder approvals

The acquisition will extend our reach to new customers while expanding our existing building industry business," said Carol Bartz, Autodesk chairman and CEO. "Our product line will offer the best drafting and model-based design capabilities on the market, ultimately helping designers, builders, and owners better track and manage their building assets"


The following is an extract from Wikipedia, showing a brief history of the programme:
"Charles River Software was founded in Newton, Massachusetts, on October 31, 1997, by Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis, key developers of PTC's Pro/Engineer software for mechanical design, with the intent of bringing the power of parametric modeling to the building industry (PTC had previously tried and failed to market its recently acquired Reflex software to the construction sector). With funding from venture capitalists Atlas Venture and North Bridge Venture Partners, Raiz and Jungreis hired several software developers and architects and began developing Revit in C++ on the Microsoft Windows platform. In 1999 they hired Dave Lemont as CEO and recruited board members Jon Hirschtick, founder of SolidWorks, and Arol Wolford, founder of CMD Group.

From the outset, Revit was intended to allow architects and other building professionals to design and document a building by creating a parametric three-dimensional model that included both the geometry and non-geometric design and construction information, which later became known as Building Information Modeling or BIM. At the time, several other software packages such as ArchiCAD and Reflex allowed working with a three-dimensional virtual building model, and allowed individual components to be controlled by parameters (parametric components). Two key differences in Revit were that its parametric components were created using a graphical "family editor" rather than a programming language, and all relationships between components, views, and annotations were captured by the model so that a change to any element would automatically propagate to keep the model consistent. For example, moving a wall would update the neighboring walls, floors, and roofs, correct the placement and values of dimensions and notes, adjust the floor areas reported in schedules, redraw section views, etc., so that the model would remain connected and all documentation would be coordinated. The concept of bi-directional associativity between components, views, and annotations was a distinguishing feature of Revit for many releases. The ease of making changes inspired the name Revit, a contraction of Revise-It. At the heart of Revit is a parametric change propagation engine that relied on a new technology, context-driven parametrics, that was more scalable than the variational and history-driven parametrics used in mechanical CAD software. The term Parametric Building Model was adopted to reflect the fact that changes to parameters drove the whole building model and associated documentation, not just individual components.

The company was renamed Revit Technology Corporation in January 2000, and Revit version 1.0 was released on April 5, 2000. The software progressed rapidly, with version 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, and 4.1 released in August 2000; October 2000; February 2001; June 2001; November 2001; and January 2002, respectively. The software was initially offered only as a monthly rental, with no option to purchase. Licensing was controlled by an entirely automatic process, an innovation at a time when human intervention and manual transmission of authorization codes was required to buy other types of design software.

Autodesk (the developers of AutoCAD) purchased the Massachusetts-based Revit Technology Corporation for US$133 million in 2002. The purchase allowed more research, development and improvement of the software. Autodesk has released several versions of Revit since 2004. In 2005 Revit Structure was introduced, then in 2006 Revit MEP. After the 2006 release Revit Building was renamed Revit Architecture. Since Revit 2013 the different disciplines have been rolled into one product, simply called Revit. In 2012 Revit LT became the newest version of Revit on the market. It is a light version of Revit with a number of features such as rendering and multi user environments crippled. With their Revit platform, Autodesk is a significant player in the BIM market together with Nemetschek (makers of ArchiCAD, AllPlan and Vectorworks), and Gehry Technologies with CATIA based Digital Project."

Interesting, right?

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