I will never forget so many weekends of my youth spent holding my eyelids open with my thumbs while my good friend Dieter Bergman lectured about the need for a new data transfer format. It made me the man I am today … tired, grumpy and frazzled …

An email yesterday from one of my old cohorts on those committees reminded of those happy times. Dino Ditta, whom many readers will remember as the founder of Router Solutions, has spent the past year working on a website designed to be an open community-based portal for creating, managing and sharing accurate 2D and 3D component package models.

“The goal,” he tells me, “is to have thousands of users generating the models using the templates we provide, and then let the global user community share the work product.”