MCAD Tech News (#216)

The End of an Era

A look at the MCAD industry makes the author wonder, where have all the product guys gone?

When the MCAD industry was born a few decades ago, virtually all of the founders who later went on to become their company’s president or CEO were intimately involved with creating the core technology that would later become viable, marketable products. Times have changed and those days are largely gone as fewer and fewer heads of MCAD companies are involved at all with product development, much less able to actually use the products they represent and sell in the design and engineering space.

Way Back When
More than 40 years ago several parties and educational institutions were working diligently on the notion of using computer graphics for mechanical design. One of the pioneers who got mechanical CAD off the ground in the 1960s was Patrick Hanratty. While working at General Motors’ Research Laboratories, he was instrumental in creating Design Automated by Computer (DAC), the first true, production-ready manufacturing system based on computer graphics.

Although DAC was a success, GM eventually chose a different direction for its mechanical design, engineering, and manufacturing software. Hanratty decided to strike out on his own and founded his own company, ICS, that developed a production drafting package. Unfortunately, however, the package was never widely accepted because it was written in a proprietary language and ran on computers that were not regarded as mainstream at the time. Read more>>

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