The Origin Story

Forty Years in the Making

In 1971, John M. Christy moved to Carbondale, Illinois. While in and around the area he started noticing geodesic domes — structures unlike anything he had ever seen. Curious about the form, he looked into the man behind them: R. Buckminster Fuller.

Through a friend, Michael S. Mitchell — who had spent years studying Fuller's work and was close to him personally — Christy was introduced to Bucky in person. Over the following years he attended Fuller's lectures with Mitchell in Carbondale and in other cities around the country, read Fuller's writings on his own, and built models to test what he was learning. One was a four-frequency geodesic dome — roughly two feet across — constructed from Fuller's published chord factors. When Christy brought it to him, Fuller recognized the chord factors immediately. Another was a small cardboard tetrahedron that Fuller personally signed "To John Christy" with a date. Christy still has it.

One line of Fuller's came back enough times in those lectures to burn itself into how Christy thought about his own work: "You can do anything you want to do. All you have to do is learn how to learn." That became the working principle behind everything that followed. By the early 1970s — well before personal computers were affordable — Christy had already begun trying to write CAD software.

In 1975, CAD systems cost $500,000 and filled entire rooms. Christy was a musician and electronics hobbyist who could barely afford the HP equipment he wanted to use. So he taught himself HP BASIC, then Pascal. By 1982 he had built a CAD system on a $3,000 HP desktop that rivaled systems developed by teams of PhDs. Four years later, Hughes Aircraft was using it to design microwave components for satellites. The result was CADD/200-300, published by Tensegrity, Inc. in Chicago. The company name was used with Bucky Fuller's personal permission, on the one condition that Christy include the phrase "The word tensegrity is an invention of R. Buckminster Fuller" whenever the term appears. Christy has honored that wording for the four decades since, and continues to honor it here.

The same approach drove the 2025 rebuild: pick up the new tools (AI-assisted development), apply four decades of domain knowledge, ship in four months.