Evolution of CAD — From light pens to Synchronous Technology!

CAD — Computer Aided Design, allows us to design and test things virtually and digitally. Eliminating the need for manufacturing a physical prototype and saving capital expenses by doing so.

The seeds of this discipline were sown by a Thinker whose name many of us would have seen in the inaugural pages our Geometry Textbooks — Euclid of Alexandria. I am sure, Euclid would’ve never imagined that the axioms and postulates penned by him in “The Elements” will form the foundation upon which today’s CAD software systems are built. CAD software history will be incomplete without Euclid.

Perhaps this is how Cool Euclid looked I believe!

We need to thank Industrial Revolution for laying the foundation of modern engineering design and drafting. CAD/CAM constitute one of the greatest technological and economic forces ever seen since the Industrial Revolution. Today’s CAD trace its root in the development of descriptive geometry in the 16th and 17th centuries. The drafting standards evolved with the huge surge in the manufacturing of machines during World War II. Many of the drafting standards we see today were revised and created post World Wars.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

The urgency that was needed to manufacture and output the ‘product’ on war-footing scale pressed engineers to find faster and efficient ways. The search for led to impressive work in the field of real-time computing, particularly at MIT. In the 1950s, there were dozens of researchers working on numerical control and automating engineering design. The leading-edge research of Patrick Hanratty and Ivan Sutherland is revolutionary and that paved the way for what we all call as ‘CAD.’

In the early 1960s, the first true CAD software, a very innovative system called “Sketchpad” was developed by Ivan Sutherland at MIT, as part of his Ph.D. thesis titled — “Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System”. Sketchpad featured the first graphical user interface; the designer used a light pen to manipulate objects displayed on a CRT. This is exactly similar to how Wacom graphic tablets work today. Mimicking graphically what the human hand is drawing on a drafting board was an innovative breakthrough in CAD software. It is a tribute to Ivan Sutherland’s ingenuity that in 2016, when operations which took hours on 1960s computer technology can be executed in less than a millionth of a second and touch-sensitive graphic display/input devices are making our jobs easier. Even today, I do not know of any leading CAD software that has yet incorporated such directness into its user interface.

Even though, Sketchpad was the world’s first CAD software. The first commercial CAM software system, a numerical control programming tool named PRONTO (Program for Numerical Tooling Operations), had already been developed in 1957 by Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty at GM. Thus, Dr. Hanratty is widely credited as “The Father of CAD/ CAM”. Dr. Hanratty’s software was used as the basis for nearly a dozen start-up companies selling turnkey CAD programs. Today, an estimated 90% of commercial drafting software can trace its roots back to Dr. Hanratty’s original program.

Drawing on PDP Type 30

Earlier computers were complex to operate and consisted of time-sharing terminals. Thus, due to the very high cost of early computers coupled with the unique mechanical engineering requirements of aircraft and automobiles, large aerospace and automotive companies were the earliest commercial users of CAD software. First-generation CAD software systems were typically 2D drafting applications developed by a manufacturer’s internal IT group in collaboration with university researchers. Dr. Hanratty co-designed DAC (Design Automated by Computer) at General Motors Research Laboratories in the mid-1960s. Proprietary CAD software programs were also developed by McDonnell-Douglas (CADD released in 1966), Ford (PDGS released in 1967), Lockheed (CADAM released in 1967). This began advent of CAD industry, a number of companies were founded to commercialize their fledgling CAD programs. Remember this was 1960 and CAD cost a fortune still was 2-dimensional. Just to put things into perspective — Digigraphics developed by Control Data Corporation was priced at $500,000 per unit and only a few number of units were sold.

The huge Cap Ex was offset by two main benefits to manufacturers:

1. Reduced Drawing Errors: It was really easy to follow the drawing standards. Multiple users sharing the same program to create drawings kept the drawings consistent throughout the company.
2. Increased Re-usability of Drawings: Congruent consistency made it easier to revise the drawing created by one user by another and vice versa. Copy-Pasting allowed data to be used directly avoiding errors that might be caused during manual creation.

Extrapolate it over thousands of drawings required for a complex product and the savings in terms of time and money are worth the machine cost.

A basic overview of CAD progress decade wise:

1960s

• The first digitizer (from Auto-trol) and DAC-1, the first production interactive graphics manufacturing system.
• Serious research into 3D modeling CAD software. The commercial benefits of 3D CAD software research did not begin to appear until the 1970.
• French researchers were doing pioneering work into complex 3D curve and surface geometry computation. Citroen’s de Casteljau made fundamental strides in computing complex 3D curve geometry. Renault’s Pierre Bezier (famous for the notorious bezier curves ;) published his breakthrough research, incorporating some of de Casteljau’s algorithms. The work of both de Casteljau and Bezier continues to be one of the foundations of 3D CAD software to the present time.

1970s

• CAD software started its migration out of research and into commercial use. It moved from being developed internally by major corporations having had large internal CAD software development groups working on proprietary programs.
• CAD began it’s journey from 2D to 3D. In 1975, the French aerospace company, Avions Marcel Dassault, purchased a source-code license of CADAM from Lockheed. In 1977, Dassault began developing a 3D CAD software program named CATIA (Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) which survives to this day as the most commercially successful CAD software program in current use.
• The increasing power of computers, with the introduction of lower cost minicomputers with optimized Fortran compilers and graphics capable terminals, were beginning to make CAD software more accessible to engineers. New high-level programming languages such as C and simpler operating systems such as UNIX were emerging into more wide-scale use and the first generation of graphics capable desktop computers (Hewlett-Packard’s HP9845 series in 1978) was encouraging engineers to experiment with programming and heralding the dawn of workstation computing.
• In 1979 Auto-trol became the first CAD software vendor to successfully complete a public offering. The CAD software and hardware market had grown from under $25M in 1970 to just under $1B in 1979.

1980s

• The increasingly widespread development and use of CAD software was prompting calls for some form of standardization. In 1979, Boeing, General Electric and the NBS (National Bureau of Standards) agreed to commence the first implementation of IGES (Initial Graphic Exchange Standard). IGES facilitated the transfer of complex 3D curves and surfaces between different 3D CAD software programs and despite other initiatives continues to be the most widely used data-transfer format in CAD software to the present time.
• M&S Computing renamed itself to Intergraph (which was later purchased by Siemens 3D PLM) had a successful IPO in 1981. Intergraph released the InterAct and InterPro range of 3D complex surface modeling CAD software based on DEC’s VAX and MicroVAX processors, these can be thought of as ancestors of Solid Edge.
• Dassault Systemes signed a sales and marketing agreement allowing IBM to resell the CATIA CAD software with their PC’s. CATIA Version 1 was released in 1982. The IBM-Dassault partnership continues strong to the present day.
• IBM shipped its first PC in 1981 and Autodesk, demonstrated the first CAD software for PCs, “AutoCAD Release 1”, in November 1982. This was going to be a game-changer.
• In 1985, a new and very aggressive 3D solid modeling CAD software vendor, Parametric Technology Corp. (now PTC), appeared in the market — commercial reality was arriving and in many ways, the CAD industry would never be the same again.

1990s

• CAD was evolving at a rapid pace. Aerospace and automotive manufacturers were no longer investing in developing CAD Softwares in-house they now preferred commercial CAD vendors to manage their CAD solutions. Thus, this trend more than doubled the total CAD software market size to the benefit of the commercial CAD software vendors.
• In 1988 , Boeing announced that CATIA would be used to design and draft the new 777 aircraft, creating a staggering $1B revenue for IBM-Dassault. This massive commitment to Boeing acted as a force shield for Dassault during the “killer” onslaught of PTC’s Pro/Engineer.
• PTC launched the first UNIX workstation 3D CAD software, Pro/Engineer, in 1987. Early on the competitors dismissed it as ‘irrelevant, immature and unstable bug’ in the market. Surprisingly, PTC had created something in sync with the existing PC wars — Pro/Engineer made extensive use of UNIX’s X-Windows to provide a user-interface with drop-down menus, context-sensitive menus, pop-up option and input boxes, icons and other user-friendly features. Compared to Pro/Engineer, the established vendors’ CAD software programs, which were all based on proprietary OS and written in Fortran and assembler, were slow, ungainly and seemingly uncompetitive. Thus, within 18 months of Pro/Engineer’s release, the CAD software market and the sales, marketing and development groups of the major CAD software vendors were in various stages of turmoil as Parametric Technology sold new licenses of 3D CAD software at a record pace.
• PTC’s Pro/Engineer continued to dominate the news with 3D solid modeling and rendering performance an order of magnitude faster than its competitors. 3D CAD software developers were working late nights and weekends trying to replicate Pro/Engineer’s user interface and match its solid modeling benchmark performance.
• Strong competition, ‘Workstation Wars’, ‘Kernel wars’ coupled with the recessions in US and Europe, started cutting down the average prices of the software and critically impacted fat profit margins. By the end of the decade, the leading CAD software vendors had become: Dassault Systemes (CATIA), Parametric Technology (Pro/Engineer), MDC (Unigraphics) and SDRC (I-DEAS). Computervision together with Intergraph were losing momentum which they were never to regain.

2000s

• By 1990, Boeing was succeeding with its ‘all CATIA no paper’ design strategy and it achieved substantial reductions in time to market by safely eliminating many of the physical mock-ups traditionally required to verify paper designs.
• Inspired by Boeing’s success other aerospace and automotive manufacturers too began considering standardizing on a single ‘corporate CAD software vendor’ for the bulk of their work and hence, in the period 1990–1993, some of the largest contracts in CAD software history were competed for and won. Pratt & Whitney standardized on Unigraphics, as did GE Aircraft Engines. Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Renault and Honda standardized on CATIA. Caterpillar standardized on Pro/Engineer too.

If you remember how Word-Processors created a revolution in the Publishing industry. Having MS-Word on each PC led to a huge number of documents created. Similarly, CAD software outputted an enormous number of drawings. We needed something to manage this ‘Big Data’ that is where PDM software paved the way. Boeing’s efficient use of 777’s Paperless design sparked an interest in using PDM software to manage drawings, to enable configuration management and change control of the huge databases of parts being created by CAD software.

References:

1. Images from Google Search, edited to add captions.
2. Articles from Evolution of Computer-Aided Design, History of CAD Timeline, The CAD/CAM Hall of Fame
3. PDF Article of Brief Overview of CAD History .