Prehistoric CAD

CAD (Computer Aided Design) software was invented in 1960's, years before the first IBM PC's ever made it to market. Since it's invention, CAD has assisted engineers and designers in several major industries to help them design and manufacture such products as buildings, bridges, highways and interstates, aircraft, ships, automobiles, digital cameras, mobile phones, TVs, clothes, shoes, and computers, just to name a few.

The first true CAD software, though primitive by today's standards, was called Sketchpad and was developed in the 1960?s by Ivan Sutherland as part of his PhD thesis at MIT. Sketchpad gave the designer the ability to interact with the computer graphically by using a light pen in which the designer could draw on the computer's monitor.

Sketchpad was the world's first CAD software. However, the first commercial CAM (Computer Aided Machining) software system was PRONTO. This was a numerical control programming tool developed by Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty in 1957. Therefore, Dr. Hanratty has been given the title of "the father of CAD CAM. CAD software is very often referred to as CAD CAM software.

The CAD revolution was on! By the mid 1960's, Dr. Hanratty had co-designed DAC (Design Automated by Computer) at General Motors Research Laboratories. In 1966, CADD Proprietary CAD software programs were developed by McDonnell-Douglas, and in 1967, Ford released PDGS and Lockheed released CADAM.

In the early 1980's AutoCAD was released and provided various operating systems including CP/M, which was an operating system created by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. for Intel 8080/85 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers and was originally confined to single tasking on 8-bit processors with no more than 64 kilobytes of memory. However, later versions of the program added multi-user variations, and were migrated to 16-bit processors.

By 1982, AutoCAD became the first program to create technical drawings, which adhered to the standards established for hand-drafted drawings. It wasn't long after, that users soon realized that CAD rewards those who are creative thinkers about their work and strive to find ways every day to do it better.

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