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By hosting contributions from Autodesk, Bentley Systems and Graphisoft, plus other industry observers, in 2003, Jerry Laiserin helped popularize and standardize the term as a common name for the digital representation of the building process. In 2002, Autodesk released a white paper entitled "Building Information Modeling," and other software vendors also started to assert their involvement in the field. However, the terms 'Building Information Model' and 'Building Information Modeling' (including the acronym "BIM") did not become popularly used until some 10 years later. The term 'Building Information Model' first appeared in a 1992 paper by G.A. The term 'building model' (in the sense of BIM as used today) was first used in papers in the mid-1980s: in a 1985 paper by Simon Ruffle eventually published in 1986, and later in a 1986 paper by Robert Aish - then at GMW Computers Ltd, developer of RUCAPS software - referring to the software's use at London's Heathrow Airport. The early applications, and the hardware needed to run them, were expensive, which limited widespread adoption.
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The first software tools developed for modelling buildings emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and included workstation products such as Chuck Eastman's Building Description System and GLIDE, RUCAPS, Sonata, Reflex and Gable 4D Series. The concept of BIM has existed since the 1970s.
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