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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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February 2019 #11235 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Innovation
Part VII: A Computer for Every Designer
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n 1980, for the first time, I witnessed the PC doing trusses. Then, over the next 10 years, I watched that machine take over every designer’s desktop. Getting to that end, though, wasn’t easy. Unprecedented technological change roiled our industry (see the Eighties below) and a severe recession curtailed investment by truss software incumbents. That left an opening for enterprising trussers to take the initiative, much like Jobs and Gates were doing in the PC business.
Joe Kannapell - P.E Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mii.com
The earliest of these innovators, Jack Ghiz and Gene Cucciera (shown here), I encountered at the 1980 Florida Truss Manufacturers conference. They had debuted a layout program that they developed on the Apple II PC while working at East Coast Lumber’s Truss Division in Florida. Their aim was to lessen the drafting time involved in truss design, “from one hour to 5 minutes,” according to Cucciera. Gene and Jack sold their program for $4,000 under the banner of C&G Micrographics. (More on their work will follow in a subsequent installment.) The Apple II’s debut in 1977 and its roaring success into the Eighties threatened giant IBM’s $18 Billion in sales, and inspired entrepreneurship across the industry. Apple’s graphical display, though not elegant, predated any comparable capability and would soon prove to greatly accelerate a designer’s productivity. Its starting price of $1298 was one-tenth the cost of the not-yet-released Hewlett Packard machines. That same year the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80 made their debuts. By the early 1980s, these early PCs began appearing in a few truss plants. However, all these machines were home computers, not yet powerful enough to design trusses, but capable of running a few business applications like VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program. Continued next page
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