In January of 2002, Rod Scholl did what a lot of people talk about doing but never actually do. He published a newsletter for ANSYS users. Called “The Focus” it was created with a very simple concept: users want a consistent and frequent publication with short, useful articles that will help them use ANSYS better. Tips and Tricks on a regular basis. Short and to the point was the main purpose, which is why it was called The Focus. The second concept was also evident in the fact that “The Focus” masthead was a blurred image. We wanted this publication to be fun and poke fun at itself, PADT, and nerds, we mean ANSYS users, in general.
Since then we have published 74 unique issues. That is 93 months since that first issue, and with 74 issues we met our goal of being almost monthly! Rod really deserves a lot of credit for making sure that we did not do what most companies do when they start a newsletter – put out a few issues then get too busy to continue and let it die. As of today, we have just over 1,950 registered subscribers, and there is no way to tell how many users around the world access the archives without subscribing.
But, as time went by we started to make bigger and fancier issues, and took longer and longer between publishings. We moved to a PDF file that looked fancy but took a lot of time to lay out and publish. We basically drifted away from that initial concept of short, useful articles that come out often. We also started feeling like dinosaurs in that we were using a “magazine like” format. It was time to go 2002 and move to a blog instead of a newsletter. And here it is, welcome.
The switch has one thing that bothers us. We now publish articles one at a time, shooting for four a month, hopefully resulting in one a week. This is great for users but we can no longer number issues. So there will be no Issue 75, which is sad. Instead, we will count years. The Focus is almost 8 years old now, maybe our grand children will be around for the 75th year?
We have published our first technical article with this welcome. All 74 previous issues are also available as linked PDF files, so you can search from this site. If you are a subscriber, you will continue to get e-mails for a while, but we will be moving to RSS feeds (use the subscribe button at the top of this page) or the Newsletter function on this blog.
Thank you to everyone that has passed along their good wishes to us over the years, that is what keeps us going. And thank you to everyone at PADT who has contributed to this publication and who will contribute in the future.
We hope you all continue to find it useful.
– PADT’s Technical Support Staff
