alt Hacker NewsTLDR: Michael Gibson is the brain child for Rhino3D's UI.
Yup. I know some of this story.
It's been a minute, so I forget some details...
Ages ago, Robert McNeel & Assoc had been working on the geometry kernel for years. They had high value customers who needed very correct results, not available (from other kernels) at the time. By that time, being a VAR, McNeel had experience with most commercial offerings.
Not having their own front end, they had to import/export to other CADD systems. One of their motivations for reverse engineering AutoCAD's DWG format.
McNeel stumbled onto Sculptura. A mesh modeler written by a solo dev. As I remember it, Sculptura's UI was innovative, amazing, and norm breaking. Exactly what McNeel was looking for. They bought it asap. (Gods, I wish I could quickly remember that guy's name.)
McNeel's intent was to synthesize Sculptura's UI and their state of art kernel.
McNeel had the dual luxury of time and no installed base (legacy). Their initiative motivation was a correct kernel. Like correctly joining 3 curving surfaces. (Their canonical example at the time was to accurately model a styrofoam egg carton.) Which took years of R&D.
So they had time to really nail Rhino3D's UI.
Aha. I just found the official history. My memory wasn't too far off.
https://www.rhino3d.software/the-history-of-rhino-3d/
Michael Gibson! Yay! I now recall him grinding away on Rhino. Whenever I visited McNeel, he loved giving demos, talking about ideas, etc. Great guy. (We were both young, surrounded by olds, so had that connection.)
I grew up in Seattle and attended West Seattle High School. The technology teacher (whose name I forget, but I can remember his face and voice!) decided to teach us Rhino3d. That went on to me talking about Rhino on Slashdot one day and a digital book publishing startup noticed my comment, and eventually offered me a job of writing a book about Rhino.
I actually haven't used Rhino for much of anything for decades now, I think the last time I used it was to build a scale model of my old town home. I cannot really justify spending $1000 on a program that I would only boot up once every few months for fun. But I have kept love for it all these years, every time I have started it up (downloaded a trial to get some particular task done) I was able to continue right where I left off making things.