My CAD History – Part 2

My CAD History – Part 2

The switch to PC based CAD was a big step. At the time there was basically the AutoDesk products and that was all. There was talk of a CAD program designed for and around Microsoft Windows but it wasn’t ready for primetime. I guess this transition was driven by two things; 1. We had a customer who required that we provide them with all the drawings associated with their parts on their drawing formats which were AutoCad. 2. As mentioned in yesterdays post the cost of maintaining and upgrading the hardware for the Applicon software was prohibitive.

During this transition I would ‘model’ the parts on the Applicon system, make a drawing and save a DXF file. This DXF file was then transferred to the PC using Kermit on a RS232 cable. This was the only way for the two systems to talk to each other. Then a co-worker who was more versed in AutoCad would create the necessary drawings. In the mean time I attended TPM’s training classes for Mechanical Desktop. We also purchased from TPM an add-on for Mechanical Desktop called AutoSM. AutoSM by Radan was a product that allowed us to design our sheet metal parts and unfold them in the Mechanical Desktop environment. I think we stated on Mechanical Desktop 3.0 which was built on AutoCAD 14. It was a capable product but overly complicated, I heard it said that there are over a hundred ways to draw a line in AutoCad. After a few years of this and my attending all the offered AutoCad classes that Blue Ridge had I was starting to get pretty good at this job. And then in 1998 we saw a demonstration of SolidEdge…

To be continued next week.