About us

The manager: Dipl.-Ing.(TH) Th. Dutz
Studied at the 'technical university of Darmstadt, degree at 1981.
Main topics: Theoretics of flowing, thermic turbo-type machines, aircraft engines

Founding of the engineering bureau : 1981
Freelancing in 'non-university fields' steel constructions, piping and vessels. In addition (!) to the freelancing, a permanent job was made during 1985-1994 for a well-known company which developed complete fibre and spinning plants mainly for the far east. Position was manager of the CAD-department. During this time I was responsible for the development of all application menus and programs on Autotrol and Autocad based systems and diverse hardware such as Sperry Univac, Apollo Domain, VAX and PC's. I wrote and serviced applications for flowsheets, piping & instrumentation diagrams, civil engineering, layout planning, piping systems, air condition and machinery. Beside of this tremendous work, I was responsible for the 'core of CAD', a staff of (in the beginning) 20 draftsmen, which produced flowsheets and P&Id's. The latest years I was in addition responsible for the complete CAD activities of the company, at this state ca. 150 CAD-stations. Direct contact to the management helped me to do the job, but at least it was to much for just one person. So I cutted it off in 1994 and reconcentrated on my 'private' clients, by this time about 50 companies. The additional knowledge was now a good investment.

babsy was born 1982 merely by chance: Due to an announced job, I wrote a program concerning straight tees according TRD301 for a programmable calculator (really, that HP-41CV was a high end tool). The job came at friday with the complication that all fittings were inclined tees and they had to be ready until monday. A re-programming was too time consuming, so I activated my private PC, a Sirius I with 256 kB RAM, 2x720kB floppies and a graphic resolution of 720x400 (IBM-PC's were availiable a year later, but took a lot of years to close up to that machine!), wrote a new program in shorter time and did the job. The first module of the later called 'babsy systems' was born. What was intented for a more private use was made public not by me but by others, so I was forced to program other modules too. In only 6 months, a complete user-friendly system including documentation was achieved and the first purchasers were Nukem and GEA.
Nowadays babsy is used by more than 100 clients with extreme variety of requirements.

Since the first installation of babsy in 1984 until now the concept of 'question and answer'-dialogs under DOS is established as a fast and efficient mode. In contrarary to the table-driven philosophy, the user has to enter only a minimum of data and must not doubt wether data for a specific field is relevant or not. But this design is no more trendy in the windows world. A static table which contains all possible input data, think of a tubesheet, was the most confusing thing in our opinion and couldn't be a user-friendly solution. As an optimum of both, we designed the dynamic table, which adjusts and modifies itself without loss of data while input is proceeding. This is the heart of babsyWin's user interface. Beside the dynamic table object, we used only a few command buttons to ensure a homogeneous layout. More information can be found in Babsy program line