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The History of CAD Software 1986-89

CAD software vendors had begun the 1980s as a collection of fast growing companies benefiting from rapid advances in computer hardware and a potential market that was expanding as falling computer prices and maintenance costs made CAD software available to more users. CAD software prices stayed profitably high and in 1981, as CAD market revenues exceeded $1B, an expectation of perpetually continuing growth permeated the CAD software industry. A sense that the major CAD software brands had been decided, and that new competitors, such as Matra Datavision, would be limited simply to niches was contributing to the leading CAD software vendors' complacency in just the same way as IBM and DEC had become complacent in the computer hardware market. GE's acquisition of CALMA in 1981 and Dassault's acquisition of CADAM in 1986 further reinforced the sense of complacency as the CAD software market began a trend of consolidation through acquisition which has continued to this time.

A further trend was contributing to the CAD software industry's complacence; aerospace and automotive manufacturers had begun to retreat from proprietary internally developed CAD software and were starting to buy larger quantities of CAD software from the commercial vendors. Boeing had started its TIGER 3D CAD software project in 1980 but by 1988 announced that CATIA would be used to design and draft the new 777 aircraft, creating a staggering $1B revenue for IBM-Dassault. Following on from its CADANCE CAD software, GM had started development of the GDS CAD software in the early 1980s but by 1988 had already instigated its C4 (CAD CAM CAE CIM) program to consolidate and rationalize the unwieldy number of different CAD software programs it was using. Similarly, McDonnell-Douglas' aerospace division was then establishing its C3 (CAD CAM CALS) initiative for similar reasons. The 1980s emerging shift from internally developed CAD software to commercial solutions promised to more than double the total CAD software market size to the benefit of the commercial CAD software vendors.

When Parametric Technology Corp. launched the first UNIX workstation 3D CAD software, Pro/Engineer, in 1987, the leading CAD software vendors were: Computervision (CADDS), Intergraph (IGDS and InterAct), McDonnell-Douglas (Unigraphics), GE/CALMA, IBM/Dassault (CADAM and CATIA) and SDRC (I-DEAS, which had been launched in 1982). Those vendors initially dismissed Pro/Engineer as irrelevant, immature and unstable, yet within 18 months of Pro/Engineer's release, the CAD software market and the sales, marketing and development groups of the major CAD software vendors were in various stages of turmoil as Parametric Technology sold new licenses of 3D CAD software at a record pace.

Pro/Engineer irrevocably changed users' expectations of CAD software's user interface functionality, ease-of-use and most especially of the speed of solid modeling. Pro/Engineer was the first mainstream 3D CAD system to fully implement the concepts first demonstrated over 20 years before in Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (except the light pen) but did so with the first 3D CAD software to be entirely based on solid models and history-based features and constraints. Literally overnight Pro/Engineer made the user-interfaces of the other vendors' CAD software programs obsolete. Pro/Engineer made extensive use of UNIX's X-Windows to provide a user-interface with drop-down menus, context-sensitive menus, pop-up option and input boxes, icons and other user-friendly features.