▲ 160 points
back
65 comments
I've been reading through a PDF on my Kindle Scribe which I downloaded from the original site --- it's a great overview, and most importantly, includes citations and references to the various papers where folks shared their research/progress.
These days of course, one would just get _The Essentials of CAGD_ and similar texts, or read: https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ or watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds
Highly recommended for anyone who wants an understanding of how modern CAD software came about.
For my part, I have found it invaluable in working on my current project as described at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43159236
A PDF of the submission? Would be grateful if you had a link; I can't seem to find one on the website.
Is it up on archive.org?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230325080337/https://www.cadhi...
if not, drop me an e-mail at my username here @aol.com and I'll dig it out.
found a PDF copy here:
http://images.designworldonline.com.s3.amazonaws.com/CADhist...
> Lemon felt strongly that timesharing systems were the wave of the future and that SDRC should focus on providing software on these systems rather than license its software for a one-time fee. Initially, the company sold ANSYS and NASTRAN on a timesharing basis using computers operated by U. S. Steel.
SDRC did SaaS in the 1970s, before SaaS was cool.
> In September 1994 the company announced that it would be restating its revenues and earning for 1992 through the first half of 1994 to include a $30 million charge relating to sales discrepancies in its Asian operations [...] The company immediately terminated Tony Tolani, a vice president and general manager of SDRC’s Far Eastern Operations.
I was going to say they cooked the books before it was cool, too, but that's a much older trick. They claimed they sold all this software while in reality they just dumped it in some warehouse at the Cincinnati airport. Then proceeded to sell their shares before shit hit fan. SEC link with more details: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/litreleases/lr15325.txt
That is to say the downright corrupt and shady sales and management team almost killed the company. It recovered eventually and ended up being bought by EDS
> While the software’s geometric modeling capabilities were improved it was the package’s user interface that really impressed me. Icon menus typically were only two levels deep compared to five and six levels in other systems [...] I wrote in the April 1995 issue of EAReport: “I-DEAS has the best interactive user interface available today for mechanical design and analysis.
I agree. Its interface would look odd and clunky by today's metrics and might even been considered unusual at that time, but it was really nice to use after some practice. They seemingly put some effort into its design.
I remember working with SDRC I-DEAS API in the early 2000s - it was well documented and "clean looking" compared to something like PTC's Pro/TOOLKIT. Interestingly, it was also CORBA-based, and it worked quite well over LAN.
I worked on I-DEAS briefly, on the FEM part, but not the UI, so never got the chance to talk to the UI team. It was a wild time. Windows NT was taking the CAD/CAE world by storm, especially with much cheaper graphics cards available. We still supported SGI, AIX, HP, Sun, but the writing was on the wall already, and there was a break-neck pace to port everything to Windows.
> They claimed they sold all this software while in reality they just dumped it in some warehouse at the Cincinnati airport. Then proceeded to sell their shares before shit hit fan.
Now crypto bros can just nakedly pump and dump. We live in interesting times.
I recently learned that there is a free community edition of Solid Edge: https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/download-solid-edge-c...
According to the History of CAD Solid Edge originally came from Intergraph. Many packages/kernels seem to have changed hands over the course of decades.
Here's a neat paper about Boeing's use of CAD and CAM in the 50s and 60s. I particularly like the story about their first computer-made part drawings. There were no printers, and plotters were too inaccurate; but they had CNC mills and they realized "if you can cut in three dimensions, you can certainly scratch in two." So Boeing's first computer-made part drawings were engraved on sheets of aluminum.
Good counter on John Walker's "The Autodesk File" https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
Seeing as David Weisberg's "History of CAD" is trending today I submitted "History of Unigraphics" by 3 of the original Unigraphics 7 dwarfs.
Edit: Unigraphics X SDRC became the system we know today as Siemens NX
It came out at the end of 2024 - these guys must all be around 80 by now.
I'll have to work through the 650 pages.
I use CATIA v5 every day, first released in 1998. It's sharp and crusty and huge, but does everything (with the right license).
Crusty it is. The fillet tool STILL totally sucks after 27 years, and I STILL frequently find myself needing to define surface geometry, fillet the surface, and use that to split the solid rather than just directly filleting the solid, in order to get the same type of fillet intersections that you get when you machine the part.
Funny, I'm French, and I know people who developed a bit of it.
If you really push CATIA hard, you can get it to crash in French, or at least crash with a poorly translated error message.
"The Document cannot be unloaded because he is dirty" was one of my favorites.
I like the "Click OK to terminate" error. As though it wants to make sure it has my permission to crash.
Me too. But I really looking forward to it.
I don't seem to find a dead tree version of the book. I don't know how much work it entails, but maybe the profits of such a sale could go to the good cause they were advertising?
Maybe it's the right opportunity to ask if you know a good online service for printing/assembling of big documents.
>Becoming a book publisher wasn’t on my bingo card when I started Shapr3D. Yet here we go! For now, it’s only available to select customers—but if there’s enough interest, we’ll make it accessible to the public. The book spans 860 pages and weighs approximately 3 kg—just as heavy as CAD is.
Become a select customer of Shapr3D and their CEO István Csanády might send you one.
https://twitter.com/istvan_csanady/status/188829861216722566...
Hmmm, no mention of Teknicad? sadface
I seem to be the only person (along with 3 others who were my cow-orkers) who ever used or heard of Teknicad , running on Tektronix Unix workstations and terminals :)
One thing about this history is that it kind of light on the development of CAM, Computer Aided Manufacturing, which was co-developed along with CAD, and in some cases was actually a predecessor to CAD.
I recommend "A Possible First Use of CAM/CAD" by Norman Sanders as a short history of CAM in the 1950s/1960s.
Excellent point, and interesting paper.
Arguably though, CAM is a totally different subject, though as you point out, inextricably intertwined with CAD in their origin.
Wasn't it a pretty straight-forward lineage of: G-code is developed, there are a couple of commercial apps which write to it, then when the EMC software is release and Mach3/LinuxCNC/Grbl become prevalent there was an explosion of different software options?
Just not sure what one could say about that which would be interesting.
tangential : I still can't get over the idea that shapr3d license is subscription only. You cannot buy the software. This means that your whole work/workflows ceases to exist if you not continuing to pay. No fallback option.
Unfortunately, the printing industry rolled over for Adobe and set a precedent.
An alternative to Shapr3D might be: https://www.plasticity.xyz/ which has an interesting license and licensing model (I bought a Studio license at launch, but haven't used it since).
Fortunately, FreeCAD is markedly improved, and for folks who want something light-weight and intuitive, I would recommend trying: Dune 3D as discussed here previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068
When I saw this thread I wanted to toss a comment in: If you used FreeCAD prior to 1.0 and abandoned it because editing past operations was an exercise in frustration-- give it a try. It now seems to be as robust in editing as solidworks or onshape is.. and is now quite usable.
I just started using CAD last week, but as I understand:
- Plasticity is so expensive because it uses one of the major kernels (SIEMENS Parasolid). Most of the licensing fee actually goes to them. You can find the Show HN post with a much cheaper price before he changed kernels.
- There was a firm called Ondsel that was trying to improve the UX of FreeCAD by selling a fork. It recently folded. One of their employees is trying the same as AstoCAD. The idea is that you fund the development of FreeCAD, and you get the improved binaries before the work lands upstream.
They have a neat program, but its really hard to defend their pricing model. I gave it a shot and its just way too expensive given the functionality. Yes, they are constantly improving, but the price for me is just too much considering alternatives.
Read through this discourse topic: https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/why-there-is-no-plan-for-hob...
I don't understand why they do what they do when it comes to pricing.
There's an interesting cultural divide here. Probably a majority of mechanical and electrical designers still think it's risky and weird to use software that doesn't come from a vendor. Even though they experience occasional outages when something goes wrong with the license billing and payment. The electricals are a bit further along, I think because they're closer to the programming world.
I think it’s more that management in this space is very traditional and from a business perspective there’s not much downside to a subscription. The individual engineers don’t really have a choice in cad package anyway and frankly, the alternatives still suck in mechanical space.
Not to mention, file formats between packages are sort of interoperable, but often the design history cannot be transferred. It’s not like software land where if a vendor goes down (and the code is reasonably structured), an organization can mostly replace it with substitutes.
Just wanted to say that i found out about shapr3d here on HN through a comment a while back. And– though it does sound dramtic– it changed my life. It got me into CAD modelling without any experience. Which i wouldn't have tried on a computer, but on my ipad, it was so easy and intuitive to get started.
Since then i've designed so many things. From weird furniture ideas to replacement parts for my vacuum up to the mot important 3d models of a device-prototype. It's super fun, intuitive and i think in general the most expensive software subscription i pay for, also hands-down the software that impacted my life the most (as a consumer/user).
Have you tried any other CAD programs?
If you have access to a computer, could you try Dune 3D and write up a quick comparison? It seems the easiest-to-use of the opensource options.
Interesting, didn't know about dune3d. I can't try today though. What are you expecting from my comparison? If i don't forget, i can come back here in a few days if had time to try dune and tell you about my experience.
I am just curious how Dune 3D "feels" to a person accustomed to Shapr3D --- the former is notable among opensource applications for having a touch/trackpad-friendly UI, which is a defining characteristic of the latter.
Have you tried Shapr3d? The tablet UX is entirely different from any other CAD program. You are asking to compare apples to oranges.
Yes, I did try it --- got part of the way through the tutorials and decided that the UI wasn't appealing enough to overcome the price/license.
Spotted one typo, the reference to Hanchette in the section on Matra Datavision should be Hachette.
That section could also mention that the Matra software is now opensource.
Why are you telling us?
I skimmed, so maybe I missed it: Is there anything in there about OnShape?
Could be a particularly interesting follow-on to the section about Solidworks and Jon Hirschtick.
No, that is too recent a development.
The book was published in 2008 and the PDF I'm reading doesn't seem to have been updated.
Rather a shame it wound up at a commercial site rather than say https://www.wikibooks.org/
Is there an overview of which software is using what kernel?
In the open source world there are 2 (maybe 3) geometry kernels that handle NURBS and can produce STEP files. Open Cascade, which is GPL now but had a commercial origin. It's quite good and is used in FreeCAD, Salome, KiCAD (EDA), Horizon EDA, Dune 3d, and probably several more. And then Solvespace which is the only user of it's own bespoke kernel which we are still trying to make more robust. This one is also limited to a certain subset of NURBS constructs but is still quite useful.
Open Cascade may be the most difficult piece of FLOSS IP to recreate outside the Linux Kernel. In fact I'd say it'd be harder to replace given the number of people with interest and the background to work on these two different type of software.
Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues do to bring solvespace to the world.
I believe it has the potential to be one of — and probably already is in — a class of super impactful, all time classic pieces of software alongside the likes of Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, et al.
Will geometry kernels ever be fully robust, or is there still a holy grail to be discovered here?
Solvespace only seems to have simple STEP export, Open Cascade can import STEP as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel
"Kernel developers section"
Thanks!
How does Shapr compare to FreeCAD?
It uses a robust, commercial CAD kernel, and has an interface optimized for touch/stylus (originally it only ran on iPad Pro when an Apple Pencil was available).
Similar programs to consider include Moment of Inspiration and Plasticity for commercial, and Dune 3D for opensource.