History of CAD
Patrick J. Hanratty is widely credited as “the Father of CADD/CAM.” In 1957, while working at General Electric, he developed a software called PRONTO (Program for Numerical Tooling Operations), which became the first commercial CNC programming system. In the 1960s many other companies that were founded pushed their own CAD programs, some of which were SDRC, Applicon, and Computervision. In the 1980's when CAD programs like CATIA became more commercial, many big consumer industries like automotive and aerospace began to show use of CAD on their new UNIX systems.
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In 1983, Autodesk produced the first significant CAD program, AutoCAD, for IBM. While still in the years of 2D CAD, this program dominated the market. In 1995, SolidWorks was released as the first significant 3D CAD program, as computers had reached the requirement to run these programs at that time. Many of the original programmers from the older 2D CAD programs were hired by companies again to produce new competing 3D CAD programs, and programs like Inventor and SolidEdge were born. Nowadays we are not seeing much of a change in the industry, but rather to keep it exciting in the meantime a lot of different programs are leaning toward opposite ends to dominate smaller markets instead of a broad market. Programs like SolidWorks lean toward the Mechanical Engineering type field with only parametric design and advanced simulations, which programs like Maya lean toward the Film industry with their box-modeling and high quality animation-rendering built in and ready to be used right away.
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