About Cadalot

Alan James Wooldridge

B.Eng. Hons., I.Eng., AMIStructE., RMaPS, FFB

                                                             Sutton Surrey England 

In 1974 I started my career as a draughtsman, working with pencil, ink on tracing paper and film, using a real drawing board and timber and plastic drafting equipment.

I have been using CAD since 1976 when I worked for the SGB Group of companies, and got involved in writing in-house CAD software on a HP 9845B Desktop Computer in HP Basic with a great Engineer and computer programmer called Ken Barber.

The HP computer had two tape streamers a 8” (200mm) floppy disk and a massive 10 Mbyte hard disk and monochrome green screen.

The Hard disk created so much heat that we had to have a fan fitted in the special CAD room that was built for this very expensive equipment cost many £1000's.

Many years later when undertaking my part time degree in civil engineering, I found one for sale at a car boot for £15 and used it to run surveying programs that had been written by our surveying lecturer at Kingson University. My final year project was to re-write these programs to run on a more modern IBM / MS-DOS compatible Personal Computer (PC) and plot to an A3 HP compatible 8 Pen Plotter.

My first taste of AutoCAD was version 2.51 and I later used, demonstrated and sold versions 2.6 and 2.7. After that I used a number of different CAD programs that now no longer exist like Pro-Design II, RoboCAD, PinkCAD, ISICAD etc.

In the late 90’s I produced a number of macros for Cadvance and configured my copy of Generic CADD at home to look like Cadvance that I used at work.

I was working on making Cadvance look like AutoCAD when In 1999 when the multidisciplinary consultancy formed within a Local Authority I worked for moved from 70 copies of Cadvance to AutoCAD, It was around this time that I found InitelliCAD.

Between 2000 – 2005, I was a Senior Structural Engineer and CDM Planning Supervisor I was also providing IT support, creating the company Intranet web site and taking on the duties of CAD Manager.

Knowing that there were many other people out there looking CAD resources on the web I created the Cadalot web to assist all Draughtsmen, AutoCAD, IntelliCAD, General CADD, Cadvance and now Revit users on the learning curve. (I’m now in the process of learning REVIT myself)

Around 2002 I thought that the web site might be useful if I left the Local Authority and set up my own structural engineering and drafting company. However I never got around to this and In 2005 I moved to Trenton Consultants who are part of the Butler & Young Group of companies, based in Croydon as a Structural Engineer.

I serve on the South Eastern Branch committee for the Institution of Structural Engineers, as the Associate or Incorporated Engineers representative. I Beta Test CAD and CAD related produces in my spare time. I’m also on the steering committee for the BAPD the British Association of Professional Draughtsmen.