Richard Hall is one of our longtime supporters and members of the North Alabama SolidWorks Users Group (NASWUG). Richard has the unique honor of being one of the first in Huntsville to purchase SolidWorks. The version of SolidWorks he started on was SolidWorks 95. Early last year Richard brought his SolidWorks 95 CD and User’s Manual to one of our group meetings. It really showed how far the company has come since its first version. The User’s Manual was at most 3/8” thick. I have told this story to many “newer” users over the past year and none of them could believe the manual was that small.

Tonight while we were sitting at the Super Bowl party Richard surprised us all by pulling out the SolidWorks 95 User’s Manual and CD. All of us started to talk about how cool it would be to have John McEleney (SolidWorks CEO) sign the book. Ten or fifteen minutes went by and we looked up to see one of our fellow NASWUG members, Brian McElyea, coming our way with John McEleney not far behind him. The great thing about it was that John had the same reaction we did when we saw it. As John was signing the User Manual with the words “We’ve come a long way baby. Just wait till 2008!”, he said “Hey, I wonder what the system requirements were for this?”. OK, now you may be asking yourself what was so great about that question. Fifteen minutes before John dropped by our table, the collective group of us was wondering the same thing and of course we HAD to look it up. It only required a Pentium processor, 32MB of RAM and 48Mb of disk space. All of us got a good laugh at not only the lowly hardware requirements of the time, but at the fact the “engineer” in all of us led to that question.

So there you go folks. If you needed anymore proof that John McEleney is one of us, there it is!

Matt Lombard and Anna Wood has some posts with pictures on their blogs of John signing the book. (Rich is the guy sitting down wearing the hat.)

Tomorrow we are going to get Jon Hirschtick (SolidWorks founder) to sign the book as well!

Stay tuned…..MUCH MORE to come!!

UPDATE (2-5-07) – Jon signed the User Manual and the CD after the general session this morning.  He had the same reaction as everyone else!  Jon even spent a few minutes talking to us about our user group!