My CAD History Part 1
When the owner of our company decided that we needed to start using CAD I guess I was the logical choice since I was an accomplished sheet metal mechanic and knew a little bit about computers. At the time I had been working in the sheet metal industry for about 15 years. My computer experience was limited to some FORTRAN programming I did in college and BASIC programming done on a then state of the art Commodore VIC20. I probably wrote the first (and only) sheet metal stretch out calculator for the VIC20. Okay, back to the story at hand…
We started with the Applicon Bravo3 software. We had a FAB module which did the sheet metal design and unfold, a DRAFT module where the drawings were made and another module called GEM (if I remember correctly) in which we could build assemblies. All of this software ran on a Digital Equipment MicroVAX. This was high end stuff at the time. One of most interesting things about this software was its interface. It used what they called Marching Menus. There was an area on the bottom of the screen that was always occupied by the menus. When you started there was simply one column of menus on the far left. As you made picks from this menu the appropriate menu would pop up directly to the right of the previous menu. This would continue until your command was finished. You might have menus strung all the way across the screen. I know it sounds cumbersome but I actually liked it. Your picks would remain highlighted so you could look back and see exactly how you got to where you were.
We used the Applicon software for quiet a few years. It’s downfall at Byers was really caused by the high price of maintaining and upgrading the Digital Equipment hardware. We were finally sold on Mechanical Desktop with a 3rd party add-on for sheet metal. (See tomorrow’s blog). What happened to Applicon? After we stopped using it they ported the application to the PC platform and were eventually bought out by UGS the SolidEdge people. I think that now it is in CAD/CAM oblivion.
NEXT: Mechanical Desktop with RADAN AutoSM
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