Our History

ENERCALC Engineering Software (now ENERCALC, INC.) originated as one young engineer playing with his new T.I. programmable calculator in 1980. In 1981, a set of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet templates were developed to automate the repetitive design of components of tilt-up and small office buildings. The software proved so productive and time saving it was decided to market it in the newly founded microcomputer industry. The entire set of 26 spreadsheet "templates" were named the Structural Engineering Library and shipped in three 360K 5 1/4" diskettes, running on a 4.77 MHz 8086 IBM PC. Typical cost of this state of the art engineering hardware and software system was $6,000!

As years went by sales of the product increased. For engineers to purchase a technical software system based as a pre-programmed a spreadsheet "template was a testament both to the intelligence of the users and to the easy and simple design of the spreadsheet based software package.

In 1986, Lotus Development introduced a tool for programmers to link programs written in "C" to the very guts of 1-2-3. Called the "Add-In Toolkit", it offered a unique opportunity for ENERCALC software designers. A decision was made to rewrite all of current engineering spreadsheet "templates" into the "C" language, and link these powerful programs to simple 1-2-3 "templates". The Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets would become data entry/output screens driving powerful 'C' language compiled processing programs. This solved the major problem with a spreadsheet.....lack of "iteration" capability that was critical to engineering tasks.

Our first application of this technology was FastFrame 2-D introduced in 1987. FastFrame transformed a simple, off the shelf spreadsheet program into a powerful finite-element analysis system with full graphics. Prior to founding RISA Technologies Bruce Bates worked on a "lightening fast" 16 MHz PC to develop the FastFrame solver. That solver would later become the guts of the first version of RISA 2-D. Users were amazed that the previously complex batch processed frame analysis systems were reduced to entering a number in a spreadsheet and INSTANTLY the entire frame was recalculated. At the 1987 Lotus Developers Conference in Boston, MA, the actual software authors of Lotus 1-2-3 were stunned to see their "business tool" doing complex analysis for multi story buildings!

With the decline of DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 , ENERCALC rewrote the entire "user interface" portion that provided the calculation screens and printing. Keeping the same "look and feel" to ease the change for users, our programmers wrote our own user interface program, as simple and fast as 1-2-3, complete with support for hundreds of printers. Version 4.4 for DOS was released in August of 1994, and produced a large increase in ENERCALC's user base. Version 4.4 for DOS has become known as the "Volkswagen of structural engineering software"... simple, enduring, yet designed to get you almost anywhere.

The Structural Engineering Library 5.0 for Windows was introduced in 1996 as a completely new rewrite of the legacy systems of the previous 15 years. Although much of the proven "C" language engineering calculation processed were retained, the rest of the system was redesigned and written from scratch for the modern Windows based computer systems. The days of a spreadsheet based program were now gone and a new system designed to be as easy as 1-2-3 was introduced. Interestingly in 2007 people still refer to the "Enercalc templates" !

Now in 2007 ENERCALC has released Version 6 of the Structural Engineering Library. In the 25 years since ENERCALC began we've enjoyed a large, loyal and consistently growing base of users. This new version is a complete rewrite....the first of it's kind. New solvers, graphics, reporting, user interface, and database designs prepare this new platform with the future in mind. We look forward to years of enhancements based on this new release!

Sincerely,

Michael D. Brooks, P.E., S.E.

President & Founder

ENERCALC, INC.