Corporal Willie, the Self-Described “Dinosaur,” Sounds Off

Richard Williams, better known among his fans as Corporal Willie, is a familiar face in the SolidWorks community, not just for his expertise of the software but also for his efforts to promote CAD education in the classrooms in his region (Clark County, Las Vegas, Nevada). Recently, in a response to my interview with SolidWorks’ new CEO Bertrand Sicot, he referred to himself as a prehistoric creature.

“We dinosaurs will perish, I suppose, and maybe someday some young paleontologist will be digging up our fossil remains,” he observed with self-deprecating humor. He was remarking on the possibility of one of his favorite CAD programs, SolidWorks, evolving into a cloud-hosted modeling platform. (On numerous occasions, SolidWorks officials made it abundantly clear they believe in cloud computing as the way of the future; however, they have not yet revealed details on how they plan to incorporate cloud-enabled features to the primary CAD package, fueling speculations and—at least in some quarters—anxiety.)

Perhaps Williams feels somewhat nostalgic about the era of powerful desktop software, expected to be supplanted soon by cloud-hosted software. In this interview with me, he made a revelation that might surprise some in the SolidWorks brotherhood.

“This is going to be hard for you to believe, and to anybody listening to this [podcast] ... I’m very optimistic about SolidWorks doing this. It’s a very, very bold step, but in doing so, it’s going to open up a lot of doors for a lot of schools and school districts to utilize SolidWorks online,” he said.

One of the handicaps of the school system, Williams observed, is aging hardware—machines that might have been top of the line when they were acquired but are now barely able to keep up with the high memory and horsepower demands of the latest CAD software. Williams sees cloud-hosted software as a way to sidestep this problem.

A member of the curriculum advisory committee for Technical Career Academies in his local school district, Williams came up with one way to attract young women to CAD education—by teaching them to design jewelry in mechanical CAD programs.

He sees social media as a way to solicit ideas and tips from a wider community of engineers, but also noted, “a lot of people tend to say too much on those programs.”

One of his recent accomplishments, he recalled, was teaching his six-year-old neighbor to use SolidWorks. He has a 3D model of a snowman in eDrawings—a testament to his protege’s skills.

Williams regularly contribute to the official SolidWorks blog.

It’s my pleasure to kickoff our coverage of SolidWorks World 2011 with my interview with Williams, presented in full below (the late Joe Greco he named as his mentor in one of his answers was a well-known mechanical CAD reporter):