Back in 1988, when I was finishing university near Munich I had the chance to sign up at a FEM seminar, given by Dr. Mueller from CadFem. When I realized they are 25 years in business, I remembered some of the history which I think is worth sharing.
Honestly, I could not really understand why people would use a very cryptic method to model a hook and run a pretty complex program to get displacements and stresses I could calculate by hand in a few minutes. On the other hand, we were in the early days of computer and we were using Siemens PC’s with a 286 processor, some of you might remember – which was exciting for a young engineer. Graphics - not existing, PreProcessing – “vi” at the best and PostProcessing done by tables and some b&w graphs – that’s the type of challenge we were all looking for.
After finishing the class, I got the chance to write my master thesis with CadFem about an updated training and user guide for Ansys Version 12 I think. In parallel I was helping some of the advanced engineers with their projects. My special thanks here goes to Erke who was very patient with my English which improved while we were working together. There is Peter, who stayed always – even under the highest stress – pretty cool and relaxed and with that behaviour he gave me some good advise for my future career. At the 8th Ansys User Meeting in Bad Neuenahr Germany I had the pleasure to pick up Dr. Swanson from the Airport – if you know how it feels to drive a VIP - Dr. Swanson was at this time one of the most respected persons in our industry and I was unbelievable proud.
I remember a day when Dr. Mueller told me he would like to grow the company to not more than 15 people – that mark was probably passed already 2 years later. In any case there are still people left from that old days which is incredible for this market segment and the pace companies changing today. It shows the continuity and team spirit of CadFem which is well-known and legendary in Germany – uups and Switzerland of course. Markus – who for some reasons called me Charlie in that days – had a good training in Munich before he opened the CadFem Switz office and grew significantly fast.
Of course not everything was bright and shiny. I was probably not the best of all engineers the company has seen so I remember my time in Hannover and Stuttgart where other people had to fix my stupid errors in night shifts to keep the customer happy. I never apologized for that but I do now! So I should not have been surprised by the fact I did not get offered a job at CadFem. On the other hand, Dr. Mueller helped me to find an application engineer position with Aries Technology which was a very good alternative.
So after more than 20 years I’m still happy in the FEM world having worked in various sales and sales management functions meanwhile. But the base for it was a simple hook modeled as beams in Ansys with commands such as node, 1, X, Y, Z and so forth. With this little blog I want to thank Dr. Mueller and the old team for the time we have spent together and wish him and CadFem all the best in the future.
