History of CAD

The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering by the late David Weisberg.

Sit back and enjoy a trip through the nearly 60 years that totally revolutionized the practice of engineering design.

I have had that tab open for so long. It’s a long read.

CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) is one of these computing application field that truly revolutionised how things are built. It applies directly the computing, the graphical, and automation power that computers provide, to completely transform over the last 60 years how we design things from an engineering perspective, by making it possible to iterate faster.

CAD was extracted from the academic sphere of pure research by the aeronautics and automobile industry, investing a lot of R&D into CAD and CAM systems.

CAD rapidly grew with graphic terminals that would connect to mainframes, with IBM and Tektronix leading, and with custom hardware. The PC revolution and the workstations played a large part in the next step evolution of CAD software. As the hardware commoditized, major CAD solutions vendors transitionned (or failed) to being purely software players for PC and workstations.

Today my prefered CAD software is FreeCAD, but there is also OpenSCAD, both being libre software.