The LDraw that never was…

[N. W. Perry]

Following up on some nostalgia from here, I thought it would be interesting to look at what was probably the earliest coordinated project to develop a Lego CAD system—what should have turned into LDraw, but for some reason, didn't:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.toys.leg...fZp59Cv88J

It's not the very earliest post on the topic, but it does go into remarkable details about how the program would work, how it would be developed and by whom. This project was spearheaded by Alex Devries (who credits Hayes Harper for the original idea).

Like I said, this appears to be the beginnings of what would become the LDraw project…but it isn't. So I'm wondering about a few things:

• What ever came of this project? Did any code ever get written, in any meaningful amount?
  
• Was the mailing list set up for this project the precursor to the LCAD list that gave rise to this forum, or was it always totally separate?
  
• How similar is this proposal to what James ultimately put into LDraw/LEdit, and how is it substantially different?
  
• Are there capabilities proposed in this system that never quite made into the LDraw format? (For example, it seems that interactivity was conceived as part of the language, so that the motion and speed of a part in a model would be recorded in the model's source code.)
  

Anyway, a fascinating piece of LDraw (pre-)history, regardless!

[Orion Pobursky]

Neither of those names are familiar to me so they never went on to be prominent in LDraw. Time Courtney might know since he was active in r.t.l as Zacktron.

[N. W. Perry]

Neither of those names are familiar to me so they never went on to be prominent in LDraw. Time Courtney might know since he was active in r.t.l as Zacktron.

My experience has been that very few of the original a.t.l crop carried over into the core group who came out of r.t.l and really blew this up into the internet hobby that it is today. They seemed more to be existing hobbyists who used the internet to connect and discuss what they were already doing, rather than develop it into something new. But many of the early ideas were there, regardless. (A notable exception to the above is Todd Lehman.)

[N. W. Perry]

Here is what seems to be the initial post proposing this project.