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The History of CAD Software

MDM&E/Unigraphics (McDonnell-Douglas Manufacturing & Engineering) had been the first major CAD software vendor to fully comprehend the rapid emergence of UNIX workstations and one of the few with a history of supporting multiple hardware platforms (having supported various Data-General models since 1976 and DEC models since 1977). In 1987 John Mazzola, Tom Curry and Jerry Maryniak had adopted an "open hardware platform" strategy under which Unigraphics was to be ported to UNIX workstations from Apollo, HP and Sun with the HP version released first (in early 1988). Dassault Systemes had also ported CATIA to IBM's new UNIX RISC workstation (the RS6000) under pressure of the close marketing relationship with IBM and the RS6000 being supported with CATIA Version 3, also released in 1988.

Dassault, with their aerospace heritage, had already earned a very strong reputation for complex 3D surface modeling CAD software when Pro/Engineer was released. Dassault was also preoccupied with their massive commitment to Boeing and felt less initial threat from Parametric Technology. MDM&E/Unigraphics was far more threatened by Pro/Engineer and was forced to react more quickly, and so, in late 1988, the Unigraphics business acquired Shape Data (which was about to release Parasolid) from Evans & Sutherland. The Unigraphics team quickly retired the PADL-2 based UniSolids solid-modeling CAD software and in late 1989 introduced a more integrated and competitive solid-modeling CAD software program named UG/Solids based on Parasolid.

Parasolid had been designed by John Owen and his team at Shape Data to be upward compatible with the previous Romulus solid modeling kernel and retained the CAM-I AIS API. Ron Davidson launched Parasolid as a "de-facto standard" solid modeling kernel business in 1989 and very quickly licensed Parasolid to Siemens-Nixdorf, General Dynamics, Fujitsu and others for integration into their CAD software programs. Independently, Charles Lang and Ian Braid had formed Three-Space Ltd. in Cambridge, England in 1985 and had been retained by Dick Sowar's Spatial Technology (which had ben founded by Sowar and John Rowley in 1986) to develop the ACIS solid modeling kernel for Spatial Technology's Strata CAM software. The first version of ACIS was released in 1989 and was quickly licensed by HP for integration into its ME CAD software.

Japanese researchers were also very active in the 1980s and Professor Fumihiko Kimura and his team at the University of Tokyo had been researching solid modeling since the start of the decade. One of Professor Kimura's researchers, Dr. Hiroaki Chiyokura, had moved into Ricoh in the mid 1980s and in 1987 Ricoh released the DesignBase boundary representation solid modeling kernel which was unique in using Gregory surfaces (as opposed to NURBS) as its primary geometry. Designbase was quickly adopted by many Japanese CAD software vendors and Ricoh began to sell Designbase through their US office in 1989. That marked the beginning of the "kernel modeler wars" between ACIS, DesignBase and Parasolid which was to continue throughout the following decade.

In the computer hardware market, the "workstation wars" fought between Apollo Computer, Sun Microsystems, SGI, HP, DEC and IBM reached boiling point in 1987 when Apollo Computer achieved the #3 position after IBM and DEC. In 1989 HP acquired Apollo Computer to take the #2 position from DEC and by the end of the 1980s, first-generation RISC processors and high-performance real-time 3D full-color rendering were setting the benchmark in the hardware market. HP and Sun emerged as the strongest general purpose workstation vendors with SGI dominating the 3D graphics workstation market.