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Autodesk, Inc. (), a Fortune 1000 company, is a software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment, and wireless data services fields. Autodesk was founded by John Walker and twelve other co-founders in 1982 . Over its history, it has had various locations in Marin County, California , USA . It is currently headquartered in San Rafael, California . ORGANIZATION Autodesk is divided into four industry-specific business divisions: ''Manufacturing Solutions'' (MSD), the ''Architecture, Engineering & Construction'' (AEC), the ''Media and Entertainment Division'' (M&E), and ''Platform Solutions & Emerging Business'' (PSEB), which includes geospatial and plant solutions, content and search, and extended design as well as Autodesk Labs. Autodesk also has a services group, Autodesk Consulting , and the ''Location Based Services Division'' (LBS). PORTFOLIO , Autodesk's flagship product.]] The ''Platform Solutions and Emerging Business'' division develops and manages Autodesk's flagship product, AutoCAD , AutoCAD LT , Autodesk's Geospatial solutions, Plant solutions, Extended Design offerings such as Design Review, Content and Search solutions, Autodesk Labs , and worldwide engineering. The ''Manufacturing Solutions Division'' develops and manages Autodesk Inventor Series, Autodesk Inventor Professional , AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Vault . The ''Architecture Engineering and Construction'' division develops and manages Autodesk AutoCAD Architectural (Old Name - Architectural Desktop) , Autodesk Building Systems , Autodesk Revit Architectural (Old Name - Revit Building) , Autodesk Revit Structure , Autodesk Revit Systems , and Autodesk Civil3D . The principal product offerings from the Media And Entertainment Division are Maya , 3ds Max , ''Discreet Inferno'', ''Discreet Flame'', ''Discreet Fire'', ''Discreet Flint'', ''Discreet Smoke'', ''Toxik'' and ''Lustre''. These Academy Award winning products are covered on a dedicated page for the Media And Entertainment Division . Other products include Autosketch , Autodesk Subscription Program and Autodesk LocationLogic . Product Name DISCONTINUED PRODUCTS From time to time Autodesk discontinues some of the products in their portfolio. Some of Autodesk's "retired" products are listed here:
HISTORY Autodesk's first notable product was AutoCAD , a CAD application designed to run on the systems known as "microcomputers" at the time, including those running the 8-bit CP/M Operating System and two of the new 16-bit systems, the Victor 9000 and the IBM Personal Computer (PC). This CAD tool allowed users to create detailed technical drawings, and was affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies. In Release 2.1 they introduced a new concept in CAD and software industry: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in , customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers. This brought as a result the "evolutionary" growth of a large collection of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform. Since Release 12, the company stopped supporting the Unix environment and the Apple Macintosh platform, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve superior performance in the Windows operating system. AutoCAD is the ''de facto'' standard non-specialized CAD solution and its file formats DXF and DWG are the most common for CAD interchange. Since the late 1990s, the company made a concerted effort to provide a product for every solution in the industry. In 2002, Autodesk purchased a related parametric modeling software called {Link without Title} for the manufacturing group, formed the foundation for future Autodesk products - a strong departure away from their 20-year old AutoCAD software code. While there is no other single competitor of similar size in the design software industry, Autodesk's products compete against products from several smaller companies, including MicroStation , owned by Bentley Systems , VectorWorks from Nemetschek , ArchiCAD , owned by Graphisoft , SolidWorks , owned by Dassault Systemes , 12d Model, owned by 12d Solutions, Pro/E , owned by PTC , and SDS/2 owned by Design Data . On October 4, 2005, Autodesk announced plans to acquire Alias in a cash acquisition valued at US$182 million. On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD. On August 28, 2007 Autodesk announced the acquisition of California-based PlassoTech. The acquisition of PlassoTech will allow Autodesk to enhance the simulation and optimization capabilities found in Autodesk Inventor software making it easier than ever for customers to simulate, optimize and validate a complete digital prototype. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 1 REVIT Revit created by PTC alum Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis, developed and marketed by Charles River Technologies, later Revit Technologies. First released in 2000. Sold to Autodesk in 2002. --> EXTERNAL LINKS
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