The Civil Designer History

Knowledge Base started in 1989 with a vision, two developers and a small operating office in the heart of Cape Town. These were the humble beginnings of a dedicated team of professionals who persevered to develop one of the world’s most progressive suites of civil engineering infrastructure design packages. The company was established with a very simple mission statement:

"To develop professional software for civil engineers."

Initially software was developed to analyse and design sewer and stormwater networks. In time, close relationships were formed with the developers of Stardust and AllyCAD.

THE INTEGRATION BEGINS...

From the very beginning we were continually looking at the bigger picture and immediately began integrating Sewer and Stormwater with various CAD and DTM programs. This lead to a basic form of data exchange between these programs which was initially done largely by means of macros and external routines to query the databases.

KNOWLEDGE BASE ACQUIRES STARDUST (1995)

While this worked (after a fashion) we wanted a simpler and more efficient system to extract ground levels to use in our Sewer and Stormwater programs. In 1995 we purchased Stardust (the predecessor of  Design Centre, Roads and the Survey + Terrain module), from Rob Wooding Associates. This enabled us to develop an improved interface between the three programs.

STARDUST V5.14 RELEASED (1995)

For six months we burnt the midnight oil as we tried to understand the code while sorting out the bugs, but it was well worth the effort as we released Stardust V5.14 in November 1995. Pirate copies are still widely in use today in the most unlikely places around the world such as Ethiopia and India.

THE BIRTH OF CIVIL DESIGNER (1997)

By the beginning of 1997 we had mastered the Stardust code and were now able to refine it by starting on a 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.

ALLYCAD SELECTED TO BE THE GRAPHICAL ENGINE FOR CIVIL DESIGNER (1998)

Initially we thought about developing our own CAD engine but soon realised that it was an enormous task. After extensive testing of industry leading CAD packages, AllyCAD, the premier draughting program for civil engineers and surveyors in Southern Africa, was chosen to be the graphical engine for CIVIL DESIGNER. This was obtained from Paul Harper, the original owner and developer in 1998.

WATER AND TURN MODULE ADDED TO V6.1 (2000)

The Water Module was added at the beginning of 2000 and integrated into Civil Designer. It was previously known as Aquanet. Water allows for a complete analysis of a pressure network consisting of pipes, valves, pumps, reservoirs and take-offs.

MAP MODULE ADDED TO V6.2 (2000)

The MAP module was further added at the end of 2000 and allows you to do standard GIS functions such as spatial analysis, thematic mapping, polygon queries, as well as topology cleanup for importation of CAD drawings.

CIVIL DESIGNER TODAY

Today, Knowledge Base has expanded to such a degree that we now have an office in each region and our ever-growing staff complement has increased abundantly. These significant growth indicators would not have been possible without your loyal support and we would therefore like to thank you.

Both members of the original team are still operational today, and consist of CEO Vincent Bester and Software Development Manager Brett Rowbotham. When the need for additional staff however became apparent, the team increased to include more programmers, a sales and training division, a marketing team, a support and bureau wing, a finance and admin section and a civil recruitment department.

Group turnover has grown by 37% in the last financial year and we have sold more copies of the program than ever before. This significant increase may be attributed to the continued success of our clients, because if you do well, we do well.

Today Civil Designer is the undisputed leader in integrated infrastructure design in Africa with an ever growing user base worldwide, and proof that sometimes the impossible can be achieved if you want it badly enough.