How Genworks came about

Genworks is a knowledge-based engineering company that makes its living by its own software. It did not start out that way.

The company tells the same story in its own voice on genworks.com; this is mine.

1996: a company with nothing in it yet

I founded Genworks on 1 November 1996 while I was still at Ford Motor Company, where I had been building generative design and engineering applications with the ICAD System since 1993. For a year the company did nothing. On 31 October 1997 I had my last day at Ford, and on 1 November 1997 I started with Genworks in earnest.

1997 to 2002: the ICAD years

For its first five years Genworks was a consulting practice, and the tool was ICAD. I did not develop or offer a kernel of my own in those years. I worked under contract at Ford and at General Motors, and gave ICAD trainings at Raytheon in Wichita and at Embraer in Brazil.

A toy macro

The seed of GDL was planted in 1997, at a Common Lisp training at Franz Inc. in Berkeley, led by David Tan of Point 'n Click Solutions. Some of the other students were from Boeing, and one of them wrote a little toy defpart macro in class, after ICAD's own definition form. That was where I saw how keyword arguments could do that kind of work in a macro. I kept playing with the idea privately, as a hobby. It grew into DRL, and DRL grew into GDL.

2002

In 2002 ICAD came apart in an acquisition, and Ford and GM dropped it like a hot potato. That same year I put GDL online as open source, and soon had a request from Alstom Power, which as I understand it had been ICAD's original customer, for a commercially supported version. GDL had been open source for only a short while; with Alstom it closed again, and stayed closed for nine years. I leaned into making a living by my own software, and I have done so since. Thanks to Alstom, and to Paul Dunia.

The closed years

After Alstom came Corus Steel, occasional defense and aerospace deployments, and a run of educational ones: GDL in the curriculum of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology, and in companies coming out of the YES!Delft incubator.

2011: Gendl

At the height of the Delft engagement, in the week of the European Common Lisp Meeting in Amsterdam where I had just given a talk, I released the kernel as open source for the second time, as Gendl, under the AGPL. It was 24 October 2011, the day John McCarthy died.

Since then

The most recent deployment is the one I would most like to see again. Over the last five years Everest Windows in the UK converted their long-lived and fairly sophisticated window order-to-manufacture system to Genworks GDL, after running it on ICAD, unsupported since 2002, for the better part of twenty years. No sooner had they converted and validated it than the company went under, and the e-mails started bouncing. As I see it, they were too slow to make the conversion and to embrace it, and by the time they had, it was too late. If you were at Everest and ran that system, this paragraph is for you: I would love to pursue a window-design suite with anyone who had experience of it. The comments below reach me, as does the e-mail on my résumé.

The rest is on my résumé and at genworks.com: the commercial engine with its solid-modeling kernel, the open-source Gendl kernel, and the workstation and products built around them.