the development of a graphical design program started already at the end of the 1950s. With autocad, the company autodesk offered in 1982 for the first time a program with which drawings could be created on a PC. In the following article, the development and application areas of the construction program are presented.
The way to a modern graphics program
At the end of the 1950s, general motors and IBM, under the leadership of Patrick hanratty, started a project to develop a graphical design program [1].
The user manual of the vector-oriented drawing program autocad
In the result was 1964 with DAC-1 (design augmented by computers) the first commercial CAD system presents. Hanratty is today considered the "father of CAD/CAM". CAD software was developed at that time especially for large companies in the aviation or automotive industry and could only be used there. Only companies of this size and universities had the necessary powerful computers. In the 1980s, the computer market was dominated by so-called "CAD" programs. workstations and commercial software was adopted, but it was still too expensive for smaller design bureaus to use. In the spring of 2019, the 5. IPEC under the motto "edge analytics" once again held at the IHK akademie mittelfranken (Central Franconia Chamber of Commerce and Industry).
A further step on the way to the modern graphics program was sketchpad, a program with a graphical interface used by ivan sutherland in 1962 for his dissertation at MIT. With the light pen, also developed at MIT in 1955, he was able to create drawings directly on a tube screen.
For a long time, the use of the light pen and the tube screen remained limited to the military sector, for example for SAGE. At semi-automatic ground environment worked since 1952. in 1963 it was fully operational to track, trace and intercept soviet long-range bombers. Since the personnel consisted of soldiers and not of computer specialists, an easy-to-use human-computer interface like the light pen for graphical input was needed – comparable to the mouse, which is used everywhere today.
Autocad for the PC
in 1982, a group of programmers around john walker and dan drake founded the company in sausalito, california autodesk, the same year a CAD program at a price of less than 1.000 dollars brought to the market [2]. This allowed engineers, architects and designers to create 2D and 3D drawings on a PC and share the files in the drawing exchange file dxf– or. In drawing dwg-format interchange. Both formats quickly developed into an industry standard.
Autocad is a vector-oriented drawing program, which builds more complex constructions from simple objects such as lines, polylines, circles, arcs and texts. Version 1 ran under MS-DOS with english as the basic language. Since the 1990s the operating system microsoft windows is supported and since 2010 autocad is also available for mac OS. Since 1986, the additional program autolisp the ability to customize drawing objects.
CAD in architecture
Autocad was quickly used to create classic mechanical engineering drawings. In the field of architecture, a debate arose about the influence of computer work on the efficiency and creativity of designs. Possible negative consequences, such as stress or even unemployment, were also discussed [3, chap. 7].
Although today CAD programs are used unchallenged in all design areas, not least because the digital data can be easily sent and further processed elsewhere, a recently published book [4] shows that these questions are being raised again. the italian architect paolo belardi publishes in it two lectures with the speaking titles "thinking by hand" and "no day without a line". From this you can see how important a critical eye is: at any digitization you can gain a lot, but you can also lose a lot- both should be taken into account.
Literature
[1] jon peddie: the history of visual magic in computers. London 2013
[2] paul freiberger, dan mcneill: autodesk’s lucky strike. In: PC world, dec. 1987, pp. 298-302
[3] nigel cross: the automated architect. London: pion, 1977
[4] paolo belardi: why architects still draw. Cambridge, mass. 2014