The Big Grabowski Does Not Abide

Journalists make stories and have subjects. They are not themselves subjects. But when a journalist has amassed a body of work that may never be equaled, over a career that spans the whole era of computers as we know them, they have earned the right to be the subject.

Such is Ralph Grabowski, 66 years old with 37 years of covering CAD, and arguably the preeminent CAD journalist. For the last few months, he has been dropping hints of retiring in upFront.eZine, his weekly newsletter.

We ask Grabowski for an interview and talk about his career. He doesn’t want to talk about himself. Then a month later...

“Heather says I should,” he says referring to his wife, finally agreeing to sit for an interview.

The petite and proper Heather Grabowski provides a contrast to the big, grizzled journalist. But she, too, is a force to be reckoned with. We’re not surprised to learn that she made Grabowski talk about his exit from his CAD publishing business. She was, after all, the one who made him get into it, kicking him out of the bed he was lingering in after quitting his job as technical editor of Cadalyst magazine. More on that later.

“We were lying in bed and she says, ‘You get out there and you find something.’”

Heather is a welcome sight at Ralph's side at industry events, where she adds social graces otherwise absent—and  kicks Ralph under the table when needed.

We get Grabowski on a Zoom call. He is in his spacious office on the first level of their home in Abbotsford, British Columbia, an hour west of Vancouver. Though we are in regular contact, we may not have seen each other for a few years.

“You got a lot of gray hair,” he says. That’s the Ralph we know. Small talk is overrated. Heather is nowhere in sight.

A trademark gruff exterior hides Grabowski’s true nature. A man of conviction and faith, he volunteers to help the homeless in Vancouver (there are many) and volunteers at food banks. He is a tolerant and caring father of three—all of whom have grown into careers and had children of their own over the years we have known each other.

Grabowski wants to push this CAD business away. I need to retire, he says, but they won’t let me. “They” being those who request just one more book, one more article.…

Oops. That may have been us. 

That’s the story of my entire time in the CAD business, he says. “Very rarely have I had to look for work. It just always came.”

Grabowski’s body of work is phenomenal. We know no other author who is so prolific. He has worked on 244 books and has 120 in his name.  That does not make him a big hit at parties.

“Do you know how to stop a conversation?” he has asked. “You say you are a technical writer and you write about computer software. People don’t know how to respond to that.”

For those of us who struggle to do a feature article a week, we have to ask Grabowski how he can churn out so much content.

“I can type 120 words per minute,” he says.

We’ve seen it. Grabowski will be bent down, typing on a keyboard throughout a conference keynote and by the time the speaker steps off the stage, he has the draft of an article, which he is quick to upload. As the rest of press move to the next session, adding to the notes that we will come back to that evening, or on the flight home, when they will have somehow turned illegible. But we are not worried. We know we will have Grabowski’s published posts that we can use as a basis for our own articles.

The rest of Grabowski’s life needs to be more peaceful, more enjoyable and with fewer deadlines. The upFront.eZine newsletter has been issued weekly since May 1, 1995. He has diabetes. An irreversible deterioration of his eyes will eventually leave him blind.

“Let’s not dwell on that,” says Grabowski. There’s much to do in the time left. He has five grandchildren, several projects in the works and lots more to read. His book club meets every week. He loves combining photography and travel. His professional calling has been narrow and specialized, while his personal interests are broad, including philosophy, economics and history.

Once an Engineer…

Grabowski graduated as a civil engineer from the University of British Columbia in 1981.

“I studied engineering for 7 years and practiced for 3,” he says in his characteristic matter-of-fact tone. Ruefulness must be inferred.

So, engineering education was not money not well spent?

“I loved my time at the university. I didn’t want to leave. It’s a pretty nice environment to be in, especially in the later years where it comes really easy and you get along with the profs and you have a new set of friends. In my last year, I made sure I had no courses on Mondays and Fridays and none before 10 a.m. So, you know, a slack lifestyle. I enjoyed it. I was specializing in transportation engineering. I discovered that it was all politics. When the government spends money, then there’s work. It depends on the philosophy of the government in power. Sure, there’s private clients, but the amount of money the private sector spends on transportation is minimal. It’s primarily government.”

How did you get started with computers?

“When I got started in civil engineering, I didn’t use any software. It was too early. The consulting engineering firm I was working for was considering CAD systems. They looked at Intergraph and AutoCAD, but they were too expensive. My boss wouldn’t even let me bring a copy of Excel to do cost estimation. We were doing road construction cost estimation by hand and with calculators. It was pretty bad—pretty frustrating because I knew there was a better way. So, I bought my own personal computer and learned how to program it. It was a Victor 9000, one of the computers that AutoCAD ran on.”

Grabowski’s growing knowledge of CAD products was shared with CAD users in the 90s as PC-based CAD products became popular. In the previous decade, big companies converting to CAD from drafting boards at great expense would include formal classroom training for new CAD users. But the low-priced PC-based CAD products[i] were sold to small and medium-sized businesses that could not afford to send users away for training. They couldn’t spare the time or didn’t want to spend more for training than they did for the software. But CAD, even on Windows, was never an application you could easily pick up, like word processing, spreadsheets or email. It took months to become proficient in CAD. Users who wanted to become proficient sooner or use CAD optimally would go to user meetings, read CAD magazines or buy CAD books.

This was the opportunity into which Grabowski jumped. He wrote volumes to help CAD users learn CAD. He received the Community Award by the CAD Society in 2002 for his efforts.

“Yeah, I have that on the wall,” says Grabowski. “I’m proud of that. I don’t care for awards, but that was from my peers.”

What got you writing?

“I discovered I loved to write as a teenager. My parents were horrified that I wanted to become a writer. My second love was model railroading. So, I decided to become a transportation engineer.”

Grabowski’s strictly user-centric approach was to cause conflict with CAD vendors and with publishers. For example, a vendor’s claim that their CAD program was contradicted by a 400-page book that had to explain how to use it. More bothersome to vendors were lists of bugs discovered by users and published by CAD journalists.

Autodesk was not a Cadalyst advertiser during Grabowski’s time there. It was not for lack of trying.

“Autodesk had no interest in advertising with us. The only time we heard from them was when they were upset about something we wrote. They wouldn’t even stock our magazine at trade shows. That’s how much they disliked Cadalyst—for whatever reason. I never understood that. I’ve always been user oriented. I’ve always fought for the rights of the user. But along comes a new person at the magazine who decided to become advertiser oriented. Of course, this horrified us on the editorial side. It eventually got so bad that I couldn’t work there anymore.”

After five years with Cadalyst, Grabowski found himself jobless again, but this time he had a wife and three kids. They had been looking for a house.

“But I was lucky. Because I was the technical editor for Catalyst, my name was known. I had no problem picking up work with multiple book publishers and magazines. It was a pretty easy transition.”

Grabowski has never been afraid to call to task big advertisers for products he found deficient or practices he found unfair. At a time when Autodesk skirted with a monopoly,[ii] there was only one journalist with the courage to speak out publicly against them.

In the late 90s, CAD journalism underwent a catharsis. The few trained journalists in the business raised the need for independence and integrity, but by then, trade journalism had swung toward what might be charitably described as advertiser-conscious, and at its most extreme, “advertorial,” content of dubious origin delivered under the byline of a publication’s editor.

But from the start, Grabowski never wavered from his convictions and continued to write from “the user point of view.”

How long have you been doing this?

“It will be 37 years in September from the time I joined Cadalyst magazine. I’m pleased that I had a single job longer than my dad, who worked in the traditional industrial era and stayed with one big company. But he was there only 30 years. So, I beat him at that.”

Do you regret not practicing engineering longer?

“Looking back, I’m glad I was forced out of engineering. It’s limited in intellectual challenges when compared to computers and computer-aided design. So often stuff comes along that makes us scratch our heads. You have to figure [out] a lot of things—like the cloud, virtual reality and where all this is going. I’m glad I got kicked out of engineering. When I was unemployed, I got to learn how to use computers, discovered computer clubs and began writing for newsletters. When I started applying for jobs after I was laid off as a civil engineer, I had four interviews in one week. Three were for engineering jobs and one was for a small magazine in Vancouver. That was Cadalyst. It was September 1985.

How did Cadalyst get started?

“The owner, Lionel Johnston, had sort of fallen into the magazine. He was a stage designer and bought a copy of AutoCAD to help him with stage design. He looked for a user group, but there wasn’t one, so he started the first one, the Vancouver AutoCAD user group, and published a newsletter. Autodesk agreed to cover the printing and postage costs for three years so he could grow the newsletter. It began to attract advertisers so that he could afford color, add staff. And so that’s when I got hired. It was September 1985.