“Following the launch of the very first IBM PC, we were in unexplored territory. The tensions were high and nothing was going to plan in the last few hours of the highly anticipated release. It’s amazing how frustrated you can get with computers” says Civil Designer Managing Director, Vincent Bester. Today, Civil Designer is the leader in integrated civil infrastructure design in Africa with a growing worldwide client base.

Civil Designer – How it all Started

In the picture: Vincent Bester with Paul Harper at the eleventh hour just before the release of the first MS-DOS version of AllyCAD in 1987.

The original software development company, Knowledge Base, was started in 1989 with a very simple mission statement: to develop professional software for civil engineers. The program was initially developed to analyse and design sewer and stormwater networks.

The next step came through a partnership with the developers of Stardust and AllyCAD. This led to a basic form of data exchange between various programs, largely by means of macros and external routines to query the DTM and CAD databases. Although this worked, a simpler and more efficient system was required in order to extract ground levels for use in the sewer and stormwater programs. In 1995 Knowledge Base purchased Stardust from Rob Wooding Associates and this enabled an improved interface between the three programs to be developed. For six months, while burning the midnight oil, the team tried to understand the code, sort out the bugs and create a working software solution. It was well worth the effort and led to the release of Stardust V5.14 in November 1995.

Vincent Bester explains: “By the beginning of 1997 we had mastered the Stardust code and started on the project that was destined to become Civil Designer. Initially we only wanted to integrate Stardust, Sewer and Stormwater, but we soon discovered that our existing graphical engine had to be upgraded in order to offer the full range of functionality we desired. Fortunately we were able to acquire AllyCAD, the premier draughting program for civil engineers and surveyors in South Africa, from Paul Harper who was the original owner and developer. In 1998 we incorporated the AllyCAD graphical engine into Civil Designer.”

Today Civil Designer is the leader in integrated civil infrastructure design in Africa and is gaining the reputation as the preferred choice of Civil Engineers in the AEC industry worldwide.

View a short demonstration of the software’s capabilities or contact us if you would like to know more.