Tips & Tricks

September 1, 2026

Honoring the Past, Designing the Future: An Interview with RISA's Founder

Bruce Bates founded RISA in September 1987 with the practical goal of creating a tool that would allow engineers to take advantage of the growing capabilities and availability of personal computers. What started as an internal tool for analyzing two dimensional frames evolved into the powerful RISA Suite we have today with 10 connected programs that support structural engineers throughout their workflow. In this anniversary interview, Bruce shares firsthand reflections on the early days of RISA. To celebrate our anniversary and celebrate this journey, RISA is offering a special promotion for the month of September. What originally inspired you to start RISA, and what problem were you trying to solve for engineers? Back in the mid-1980’s, I was employed by Fluor Corporation in their Structural Systems group. We developed and supported mainframe-based structural engineering applications. When IBM released their ﬁrst personal computer around that time, Fluor acquired a supply of them and I was assigned the task of ﬁguring out what, if any, use this new device could have for the structural engineering department. In collaboration with the structural engineering department, I developed a PC based 2-dimensional frame analysis program using the BASIC programming language, ingeniously named PC-Frame. PC-Frame proved…