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Designers, Architects Celebrate 25 Years of Computer-Aided Design

I'm surprised at how poor a job WIRED did of recognizing 25 years of AutoCAD.

Designers, Architects Celebrate 25 Years of Computer-Aided Design:

Autodesk's former CEO Carol Bartz used to be fond of saying, "Look around you: If God didn't create it, AutoCAD did." That wasn't just hubris, either. For a time -- especially during the late '80s and early '90s -- Bartz's statement was actually pretty accurate. During that period, Autodesk's computer-aided drafting (CAD) software was pervasive across a wide variety of fields. In fact, most of the buildings that went up during that time were designed, in some capacity or another, using AutoCAD.

On Thursday, Nov. 15, AutoCAD -- and the company that created it -- celebrate their 25th anniversary. In that quarter-century, much has changed in the CAD world. The industry has become more diversified and competitive, yet the same things that made computer-aided design commercially popular 25 years ago remain just as true today.

"What AutoCAD did, if you look at a snapshot of the past 25 years, was really to democratize computer-aided drafting," says Mark Fritts, a senior manager at Autodesk and, prior to that, a licensed architect in California.

Before its commercial availability, computer-aided drafting (or design) was limited to massive corporations or large universities. Such software required not only huge amounts of computing power, but also large swaths of dedicated floor space to house the hulking machines needed to run it. (Click above to read more)

Posted on Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 06:09PM by Registered CommenterJoel | Comments1 Comment

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Reader Comments (1)

I too am surprised at how little the Wired piece said. When AutoCAD came out, I was working at cae Magazine in Cleveland. As such I got hold of a free "editorial" copy of the software. I spent the next few years covering this package as well as the few others that came along. The biggest "missing" point in the article was the theme of data portability. Before CAD, you had to ship a piece of paper to literally get everybody on the same page. Wired missed the point that portable data facilitated communication throughout the plant. For the first time (repeating myself a bit) every single interested party could be on the same page, in minutes, without a single scrap of paper. Too, the time saving aspect while mentioned was not quite strong enough. One of my college professors was consulting for Caterpillar and told the tale of the novice draftsman (pre-CAD) who was told to put the nameplate on a piece of large eath moving equipment. As a novice he was not trusted to change geometry. After studying the problem, he put the plate where HE had to move the fewest lines to add the plate. In the field, you had to drop the engine and then sometimes the transmission to read this plate, because it was on an interior surface. This took a day. Yes, it took one day to find out the serial number so you could order parts. So, CAD not only sped the immediate process, it had immense impact on the entire product life cycle. So even 25 years ago (though they did not know it yet) CAD was the heart of the concept of product life cycle.
November 16, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterJim Finkel

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