A Brief History of CAD

The beginnings of CAD can be traced to the year 1957, when Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty developed PRONTO, the first commercial numerical-control programming system. In 1960, Ivan Sutherland MIT's Lincoln Laboratory created SKETCHPAD, which demonstrated the basic principles and feasibility of computer technical drawing. Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer systems (or workstations) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. With CAD, basic geometry could easily be generated, multiplied, edited, scaled and otherwise manipulated with great speed and accuracy. Work that traditionally required the collective collaboration of scores of manual draftsmen over a significant period of time could now be conducted by a handful of individuals within a fraction of the time and across remote locations thanks to the internet, thus increasing efficiency and productivity beyond measure.

Today, with the availability of software such as Auto CAD, Revit and Solidworks, CAD serves as an indispensible arm of all major engineering industries extensively used in many applications including automotive, shipbuilding, and aerospace industries, industrial and architectural design, prosthetics, and many more. The modern CAD era has been marked by improvements in modeling, incorporation of analysis, and management of the products we create, from conception and engineering to manufacturing, sales, and maintenance (what has become known as PLM, product lifecycle management).