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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
April 2019 #11237 Page #8
Adverti$er
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Innovation Part IX: Windows into Truss Design Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
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wo unstoppable waves merged to form the tsunami that swept over truss design in the 1990s. The first was the mass commercialization of the PC, accelerated by Michael Dell in the late 1980s. The second was the graphical user interface (GUI), exploited by our David McQuinn in the early 1990s. Though the GUI was destined to multiply the power of the PC, the adoption of new technology was clouded by the failing economy. Housing starts were at the lowest levels in our lifetimes, depressed by 10% mortgage rates as we entered the Nineties.
Historical Housing Starts
Truss designers were gaining new tools, but were also coping with more complex designs and unproven technology. Most had PCs in front of them, but they were unreliable, and were limited by antiquated programs and inadequate “horsepower.” We introduced new design tools, like “Profile Input,” but they yielded only incremental improvements. Much design time was lost tweaking computer hardware, just to get cutting lists to the shop. All the while, a vast array of new peripheral hardware was entering the fray. New printers, plotters, monitors, and mice promised to improve our productivity, if only they would “talk” to our clone computers! Behind the scenes, truss industry computer gurus were sorting out this ever-changing wave of technology, and most were biased by their twenty-year investment in legacy software: all except our David McQuinn. Dave had come to us from outside our industry with a fresh outlook, which was affirmed by our new ownership which recognized the pre-eminence of software. Dave himself had been assembling clone PCs and sending them out to us in the field, and he said in retrospect, “We wanted to build this new app around the ‘IBM compatible PC’ hardware standard which seemed to be evolving and standardizing. The price / performance point was about right for our market.”
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