Yes, time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like bananas.

I began my modeling journey in the fall of 1994. I was given a rolling ruler, a tape measure and a clip board to audit a small commercial building. Having gathered the building information, I went back to the office and opened the DOE2 Basics, fired up the old 8086 DOS box and started typing. We were using Acrosoft DOE2.1e and Brief for the text editor. I still program my text editor to use the Brief keystroke short cuts. The 40 MB hard drive filled up pretty quickly. Upgrading cost $1 per MB ? a 350 MB hard drive cost $350.

I was very grateful when I discovered DrawBDL for debugging the geometry ? thanks to Joe!

Christopher R Jones, P.Eng.
T+ 1 416-644-0252

[cid:image001.png at 01D4D589.0B746400]

Chris,

You're welcomed! The history behind DrawBDL was that I got tired of
drawing little sketches on paper to visualize what a model looked like,
and wrote a little program that read the coordinates and turned it into
an input file for a Unix-based sketching program at the Lab (TELLEGRAF).
I then showed it to a programmer friend who said he'd try turning it
into a PC program using Turbo Pascal. In 3 weeks time he had a working
prototype, but being a real computer programmer Jim said that we were
only half done.? So true that was!

One reason for the gaudy primary colors for the surfaces was that Jim
was concerned about what graphics processors people had on their PCs and
so stuck with 16-bit color. PCs were so limited in power then that when
I went to DOE in the early 90's and demo'd DrawBDL on somebody's PC
there, the drawing was so slow (blink ! another window! ) that I stopped
the demo to avoid losing the audience.

Those were the days.

Joe

Melissa,

Wow, when you mentioned hourly load profiles for commercial buildings, that really brought
back to me memories from that time long ago!? For years, the work I did on load profiles
was funded by the Gas Research Institute in Chicago (now I think merged with GTI), exactly
for the purposes that you apparently used it for, i.e., as a convenient way for engineers
and manufacturers to evaluate their equipment without having to do building energy
modeling.? For a while, there was a slow but steady stream of people who were interested
in the load profiles, each of whom wanted some level of customization - like a heat pump
guy who didn't want a night setback, etc.? The realization struck me to make the building
prototypes as flexible as possible, since very few people wanted just to rerun the model
with no changes at all!??? So, I kept "macro-tizing" the building models so at the end, it
was just a collection of macros and include files that people can switch out.?? Then,
there was one consultant who came by my office to say he wanted to get the whole set of
hourly load profiles and asked if I could put it on the Web so he could download it (mind
you, this was in the 1980's).? I told him I thought that would be incredibly slow, but his
response was, eh, we'll just let the machine sit there for a night. Amazing how much data
are now transferred over the Web every single moment.

Joe

Joe Huang
White Box Technologies, Inc.
346 Rheem Blvd., Suite 205A
Moraga CA 94556
yjhuang at whiteboxtechnologies.com
http://weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com for simulation-ready weather data
(o) (925)388-0265
(c) (510)928-2683
"building energy simulations at your fingertips"