Young Alabama tech workers cheered and applauded wildly Thursday the men who created key innovations of computing like interactive mapping and Computer Assisted Design (CAD), and used those innovations to build one of Alabama’s legendary technology companies. Intergraph, the company they work for and were cheering, was at one time Alabama’s largest corporation with annual revenues of $1.2 billion.

Founders of M&S Computing, the company that would become Intergraph, spoke to the young techies, other trail blazers and news media at the gleaming, modern company Hexagon-Intergraph in Madison. One of the founders was Jim Meadlock, the "M" in the original company known as M&S Computing that would become Intergraph. Hexagon-Intergraph, the current company, was created when those two companies merged in 2011.

“There was no ‘draw a circle,’ Meadlock said of early computer abilities. “There was no ‘give it a point and a radius and it will draw (the circle) for you.’ There was no clicking a line and saying, ‘Now, draw me some parallels.’”

Meadlock remembered presenting his young company’s skills to a Texas company that had 1,000 draftsmen on its staff to do such jobs as drawing blueprints. “'This is like going to your own funeral,'” one of the company’s executive told Meadlock afterward. “This is going to destroy my business.”

Intergraph would destroy businesses, and it would become famous and successful creating computer chips that allowed users to turn reams of data into easily manipulated images. Co-founder Bob Thurber gave one example of a utility company that bases its rates on its assets. “We were the first graphics system for utility companies,” Thurber said. “They want to know how old a telephone pole is. But you can’t put all that data on a screen. Nobody can read it.”

Now, you can click on a symbol on a map on a computer screen and read a pop-up window with “all the data” about that telephone pole. That was something different and valuable. That was Intergraph.

The company is famous for one of its early hard-won successes: digitizing all of Nashville’s city maps. The resulting display allowed the city to keep up with changes in traffic patterns and plan new roads or expansions. But the project hit an early hurdle when Nashville municipal workers balked at entering the first maps’ data. Intergraph agreed to do the job for $80 a map.

“It probably cost us $500 a map...,” Thurber said Thursday. “We didn’t realize how hard it would be.” But doing that work forced Intergraph to truly understand and eventually create a map-digitizing system it could expand into other areas - like utilities. The company’s first three big, early sales in 1973 were systems for the Army Missile Command to design printed circuit boards, Nashville’s mapping system, and an engineering drafting system.

Jim Meadlock, co-founder of Huntsville computer design company Intergraph, speaks to a 50th anniversary crowd at the company's headquarters Oct. 3, 2019.

Thurber is known in the company as “the father of (industrial) plant design,” which Meadlock called one of the company’s two key lines of graphics business at the beginning. Meadlock, Thurber and three other original Intergraph employees had learned computing at IBM, where they helped develop the “instrument ring” for the Apollo program’s Saturn V rocket. But when Apollo 8 circled the Moon at Christmas in 1968, that system was considered proven. The end of that NASA work was in sight, and the five formed M&S Computing on Feb. 10, 1969.

Government consulting contracts would remain a key part of Intergraph’s business, but the computer graphics capabilities spread to uses that were unimaginable then. California would use Intergraph technology to map areas vulnerable to earthquakes. Airlines would use it to create flight simulators to train pilots.

The computer chips that powered systems like these were so successful other major computing companies built chips of their own that Intergraph claimed in court were patent infringements. Intel, Hewlett-Packard and other companies would eventually pay Intergraph hundreds of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits.

Today, the company is a part of Hexagon and still a major player in computing systems for government and industry. Thurber is advising young companies at BizTech, a Huntsville business incubator. He said he recently advised his own grandson, a Georgia college student, to consider a career in the computing area Thurber sees growing faster than any other: cyber-security.

Meadlock and wife Nancy Meadlock, another original M&S founder who ran the company’s financial and administrative services, would go on to build the Perdido Beach Resort in Orange Beach, Fla., which Nancy Meadlock managed until her death in March.