Origins of Revit

[SCShell]

I wonder in particular if there were any architects involved with the programming of Revit from an early stage?

Hey there,
See my reply here. Sorry, forgot to quote you so you knew that I was responding to your question.

[jondotdot]

The true answer is they were given Reflex as part of their severance together with 250 hours of each of the main programmers.

The core system is almost identical. I am happy to show the old reflex manuals which show this.

[vango]

Revit was originally the Revit Technology Corporation, which was originally called Charles River Software. Irwin Jungreis and Leonid Raiz started the company to solve what they thought was an absence of a parametric modelling platform for architecture.

ArchiCAD wasn't quite what they were thinking of: and so the idea for something like Revit was born.

Irwin and Leonid both worked at the Parametric Technology Corporation where if memory serves correct they worked on Pro-Engineer. They both decided around the same time (1998 or so?) to fill this void in the architectural CAD world.

Irwin and Leonid then worked on getting some venture capital together so they could develop the software. They hired architects to help with product design, and I think I recall seeing some ads on a MIT job board for programming positions at Revit! The first lines of code were written in early 2000.

I'm under the impression that Revit had more than one offer to be bought out over the years, and that Autodesk didn't get to buy the company the first time they asked

Revit was and is being developed by crack programmers and product designers, and is being developed by a parent company that supports its goals, and has a rabid following of users who can't wait for what's coming next. Last but not least: you never used to be able to buy Revit - you had to lease it. So if you're keeping Revit, Autodesk has made it a lot cheaper to own now than used to be.

you actually still don't own Revit, you lease it. Try to sell it yourself, its illegal to resell an Autodesk Product. you have never owned an Autodesk product and you never will, you lease the license and if you don't subscribe and stay current, it just stops getting supported. I subscribed to Revit before Autodesk - worked on a house, and spent alot of time on the phone with tech support - Revit was really talking smack about Autodesk and "owning them". I wished they had stayed the course and never got in bed with AD. Now Revit users are stuck paying subscriptions to Autodesk as they try to make it AutoCad. Whatever happened to architectural software for architects by architects?

[peterdew]

The true answer is they were given Reflex as part of their severance together with 250 hours of each of the main programmers.

The core system is almost identical. I am happy to show the old reflex manuals which show this.

Thank you, jondotdot;

I have always said the same thing as referenced by others on this thread. In my view, Revit is a developed version of ProReflex making it easier to create drawings, especially re-engineering and automating View Objects backwards from placing Section and Elevation lines, and allowing the outlines of objects to be edited rather than having to start again (including Slabs, Walls, Ceilings, etc) and letting Walls join Slabs and Roofs as well as Doors and Windows. I can also see that the ProReflex idea of Draw>Line>Assemble>Exchange is the basis of Sketching things in Revit, at first sight a key difference between the programmes. In fact, I would say that the key differences between the programmes are in the things that you still can't do in Revit, ProReflex Shells for example, which is surprising 17 years on. How about rendering Plans, Sections and Elevations; is that possible yet in Revit ?

I am not a computer programmer and don't understand how Leonid Raiz could say that Revit and ProReflex don't have a single line of code in common, especially considerring both were written in C++, and that they have a common wall join bug, where multiple wall joins at acute angles to a fixed point leaves a mess, perhaps as it would in reality, you may say.

As for setting up a separate company to develop Revit when they should have been working on ProReflex, perhaps true, but didn't Charles River Ventures also back PTC themselves when they started up, sponsoring another Russian mathematician as Googling the origins of PTC suggests ? Perhaps both PTC and Revit were really Charles River Ventures' companies all along ?

PS: I should add that I only came across this thread after discussing what I thought had been the origins of BIM with Sonata, subsequently Reflex and ProReflex. I was prompted to investigate a few days later and here I am . . . . a blast from the past indeed.

[peterdew]

That was Peter Dew working somewhere in the Arab Emirates ~ As matter of fact he was working on some nice projects and doing it very nicely in Pro Reflex ..he sent me a couple of images and I remember being impressed.

Thank you, Roger

[irwin]

The true answer is they were given Reflex as part of their severance together with 250 hours of each of the main programmers.

The core system is almost identical. I am happy to show the old reflex manuals which show this.

Actually, neither the concepts nor the code base of Revit were derived from Pro/Reflex. The most recent issue of AECMAGAZINE included my letter revealing the real relationship between Revit and Pro/Reflex. It may be seen here: http://aecmag.com/59-features/1352-c...history-of-bim.

[UpNorth]

It is interesting to see this topic come up again. I recently started a blog and did a quick write up on this: https://bimchapters.blogspot.com/201...-creation.html

[a_meteni]

Here’s another recently published article in AEC Magazine regarding the same subject:
https://aecmag.com/features/explorin...istory-of-bim/