About Me (David Henderson)

After studying Architecture at the University of NSW (in Sydney) in the 1970s I realised my aptitude was more technical than creative. I did a college course in programming a few years after graduating from university.

My first programming job was with NSW Building Society (later Advance Bank) where I stayed for many years, mainly using Microsoft Pascal on the BTOS/CTOS operating system.

Technical interest saw me purchase a copy of DataCAD in the early 1990s, and I used it for a few years to run a part-time drafting business. In the mid 1990s I started to 'play around' with DCAL. It was not difficult to learn due to similarity to the Pascal which I had been using for several years. I developed several macros My macros included dhShadow, dhText, and dhOffset amongst others.
dhOffset & dhText were probably the most popular,
whilst dhShadow was the most complex.

There are still people using these 3 macros today. Click
the link for a recent discussion about the 'dh' macros. and sold them from the dhsoftware.com.au website for a number of years. During this time I also did a small amount of programming work for DataCAD LLC A quote from Evan Shu in his editorial to the July 2017 issue of 'Cheap Tricks' newsletter:

"While we have been aware of David Henderson’s previous good work in his dH macros, we only recently learned that he almost became a full time programmer for DATACAD, moving from Australia to the States. He had proved his worth as a consultant programmer by creating such amazing features in DataCAD as the TIN modeler and 3D Knife (Mar 04). (You might call him Bill D’Amico 2.0!) Alas, it was not be — our loss. But perhaps now we will benefit greatly from his retirement free time."

Thank you Evan! Mostly true: I worked in the DataCAD offices in Connecticut for about a month, and then remotely from Australia over a few more months, but never contemplated moving to the States!.

In the early 2000s I abandoned my macro business and involvement with DataCAD to concentrate on my full-time career in banking and treasury software.

I had moved to the Blue Mountains when I married in 1980, and in 2015 I retired to spend more time there as well as at our small hobby farm near Oberon (where I like to potter around in our extensive garden and kayak on the lake).

Winter at Oberon can be quite cold, and I felt I was watching too much TV when it was too cold in the garden or on the lake. As a result I decided to take up DCAL programming again as a bit of a hobby (and brain stimulation!). The source code of the old 'dh' range of macros had been lost due to multiple media failures, so the first task I set myself was to re-create a shadow casting macro. I also re-registered the old dhsoftware.com.au domain to distribute the new macro.