Autodesk 123D

» see 123dapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

123D was aimed at the maker shelf, at the person with a printer in the garage and a free saturday. i have spent my working life on the other side of that line, where the tools cost money and the license arrives as a purchase order signed by somebody in finance. So this is a grave for a thing i watched from the professional side of a fence Autodesk built on purpose and then knocked down.

It launched in may 2011 and grew into a set of free apps rather than one program. 123D Design was the modeler, deliberately stripped of the vocabulary that makes real CAD unlearnable. 123D Catch was the strange one. You walked around an object taking photos with a phone and uploaded them, and a server somewhere sent back a mesh. Photogrammetry as a free consumer app, in 2012, on an iPad.

The rest filled in around those two. 123D Make sliced a solid model into flat sheets you could cut out of cardboard and glue back into the shape. 123D Circuits let you wire a breadboard in a browser and watch an Arduino sketch run on it. None of it cost anything, and for a stretch in the middle of the 3D printing boom, none of it had a serious free competitor either.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The timing was not an accident. Between 2011 and 2014 desktop 3D printing went from a hobby to a hype cycle, and the thing everybody discovered on day two of owning a printer is that they had nothing to print. Thingiverse held other people's models. 123D was the answer to wanting your own.

Autodesk pushed it hard into schools and libraries, and it worked. A generation of kids learned that a solid model is a thing you can make, not a thing that requires a license and a training course. That was the whole point, and Autodesk said so out loud: free tools for hobbyists and makers, a pipeline of people who might one day pay for Fusion.

~ the funny part ~

The announcement came in late 2016 and the wind-down finished on 31 march 2017. Autodesk's stated reason was streamlining, moving everything to cloud services and consolidating a portfolio that had grown too wide. The word it used about its commitment to free tools for hackers and makers was "committed," in the same paragraph where it turned five of them off.

The survivor was Tinkercad, which Autodesk had not written. It bought Tinkercad in 2013 from a Finnish developer who had already announced he was closing it. So the free browser modeler that Autodesk built with its own engineers is gone, and the free browser modeler it rescued from someone else's shutdown notice is still running a decade later.

~ what it became ~

The pieces did not all go to the same place. 123D Design was pointed at Tinkercad, which was simpler than what people were losing. 123D Make and the modeling side went into Fusion 360, which was more complex and, for hobbyists, eventually came with terms that kept tightening. 123D Catch turned into ReMake and then into ReCap Pro, which is a professional photogrammetry product with a professional price.

That is the actual shape of what happened. A free suite got sorted into a toy at one end and a paid product at the other, and the useful middle it had occupied was simply removed from the map. 123dapp.com does not resolve to anything today.

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