Ralph Grabowski Retiring

Ralph Grabowski has been around the CAD world for a long time, mostly on the CAD journalist side of things. He is known primarily for his writing about AutoCAD and AutoCAD clone software, although he has certainly written a lot about 3D software as well. He and I have some things in common, but I wouldn’t compare myself to him. We have both written books, but he has written hundreds and I’ve written a handful. We have both written articles, but he has probably written thousands, and I’ve written dozens. We both have written from the end user point of view rather than the corporate or marketing point of view, and to some extent, I think we have both paid a kind of price for that. We both have CAD topic blogs, but … well, you get the picture. Ralph is a CAD journalist, and I’m a monkey who bangs angrily on the keys.

I’ve met Ralph a couple of times. I’m not really a proper part of the CAD journalists circle, since I’m a bit too much of a user, and too little of a real writer (cannot properly place a semi-colon, and still end sentences with prepositions). Things that interest real CAD journalists tend to alternately baffle or bore me, and things that I’m interested in seem trivial to real journalists. Still, it has been interesting for me to get a bit of an inside view of the practice and practitioners from time to time, and Ralph has definitely been part of that.

Through an Engineering.com article published yesterday, I learned that Ralph is retiring. He leaves a huge legacy in print and digital formats, having written for some of the most prominent old school magazines like CADalyst, CADence, CADDigest and TenLinks. His WorldCAD Access blog has been active since 2003, and UpFont eZine site has been active since 1995. Much of his coverage branches far afield from strictly CAD and engineering tools into IT issues, computer hardware, travel, software, mobile technology, and more. You tend to develop a wide circle of expertise when you are constantly surrounded by and evaluating engineering tools and practice.

Ralph is mainly known as an author of books for 2D applications – AutoCAD and the ODA/DWG clones. If you search Amazon, nearly 60 of his books go back to 1991, and that’s not nearly all of them. He was working at CADalyst magazine in the 1980s. If you take a deeper look at the CAD articles he has written, you find that he spent a lot of time on the underdog software out there. Sure, you’ll see the occasional article about Dassault, PTC and Siemens, but when you filter out the peripheral issues, there is a lot of talk about underdogs like you find in the ODA (Open Design Alliance), which has taken on the task of extending what you can do with the DWG file format (original AutoCAD format). Some of his books even covered Visio. Plus, he is one of only 3 people I know (including myself) who has written a book on the riveting topic of CAD management.

Ralph has been known to occasionally comment on this blog, usually to add some historical perspective. I used him as a source for an article I wrote on IronCAD, and he has republished one of my Dezignstuff articles. I tried to learn something with every interaction I had with him, as it’s easy to think your corner of the world is the only thing that matters. Clearly, there’s always another perspective.

Ralph has been an unrelenting independent voice in the CAD journalistic world for decades, and there may never be anyone who catches up to him in terms of sheer volume. He has also become … I don’t want to say revered, but certainly known for particular personality traits. Not to say that he’s grouchy, but he doesn’t mind saying what he thinks, and that, I think, is admirable. Most journalists are too easily swayed by what advertisers will think, and not concerned enough with what actual users/readers think. Ralph doesn’t seem to take that approach.

So I’ll be sorry to see Ralph go, but recognize that he certainly deserves to do something else with his time. His independence and tenaciousness have been examples we all can learn from.