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The History of CAD Software

CAD software began the 1980s as a research topic that had just blossomed into commercial profit but the CAD software industry was to end the decade facing the stark reality of harsh commercial competition driven by frenetically commercial product development schedules and unprecedented change in both hardware and CAD software technology.

In the early 1980s DEC's new VAX range of minicomputers seemed set to dominate engineering computing and CAD software for the decade. In many ways, DEC's MicroVAX paradoxically marked the company's apparent technology lead and yet foreshadowed the impending workstation era (which would ultimately be DEC's demise) by setting new standards in price, performance and accessibility and becoming the first performance computer capable of running CAD software but not requiring special power supplies or cooling.

In the CAD software market, M&S Computing renamed itself to Intergraph in 1980 and had a successful IPO in 1981. In 1983 Intergraph released the InterAct and InterPro range of 3D complex surface modeling CAD software based on DEC's VAX and MicroVAX processors. At that time most successful CAD software was sold as a turnkey hardware/software package and realizing the apparent commercial potential of CAD software to help sell its computers, HP set up its commercial CAD software group in 1980 to develop the its PE CAD software. Avions Marcel Dassault created its Dassault Systemes subsidiary in 1981 and signed a sales and marketing agreement allowing IBM to resell the CATIA CAD software. CATIA Version 1 (which was an add-on for CADAM providing 3D surface modeling and NC functions) was released in 1982 and the IBM-Dassault partnership continues to the present time. GE also moved into the CAD market in 1981 with its acquisition of CALMA which at the time was earning over $100M annually.

DEC was the undisputed #1 vendor in the crowded engineering minicomputer market of the early 1980s but a new challenge, the UNIX workstation, was emerging to revolutionize the computing and CAD software markets far more rapidly than anyone, most especially DEC, anticipated. UNIX's open architecture opened the performance computer market to a new wave of low-cost, low-maintenance, high-performance workstations with hardware optimized specifically for science, engineering and of course CAD software applications. Apollo Computer started the trend in 1980, then Sun Microsystems in 1981 and Silicon Graphics in 1982. The mainframe and minicomputer makers (IBM, DEC, Burroughs, Unisys, Data-General, Wang etc.) suddenly began to find themselves undercut and outflanked as the newcomers used their UNIX open-architecture advantage to focus on rapidly improving hardware and growing market share while the traditional vendors were forced to maintain expensive proprietary operating-systems supporting legacy hardware.

PCs also first appeared in the early 1980s. IBM shipped its first PC in 1981 and Autodesk, founded in 1982, demonstrated the first CAD software for PCs, "AutoCAD Release 1", in November 1982. Adra Systems was founded in 1983 and soon after began shipping its CADRA 2D CAD software. In 1984 Bentley Systems was founded and released MicroStation, a PC implementation of Intergraph's IGDS CAD software and the following year Micro-Control Systems was founded and released the first 3D wire-frame CAD software for PCs "CADKEY". Apple had released the first Macintosh 128 in 1984 and in 1985 Diehl Graphsoft was founded and released MiniCAD which rapidly became the best selling CAD software on the Mac.