The Then and Now of AutoCAD
History
AutoCAD was derived from a program begun in 1977 and released in 1979 called Interact CAD, also referred to in early Autodesk documents as MicroCAD, which was written prior to Autodesk’s formation by Autodesk co-founder Mike Riddle.
The Origins of AutoCAD
The company behind AutoCAD, Autodesk was founded in 1982 by John Walker. He and the other 15 co-founders intended to develop five different desktop automation applications, hoping that one of the applications would take off.
Their flagship product turned out to be AutoCAD. They launched AutoCAD at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas as the first CAD program in the world to run on a PC. By March 1986, only four years after it was introduced, AutoCAD had become the most widely used design application worldwide, a position it still holds today. AutoCAD has been available on the market since 1982, making it the first CAD system developed for PCs. This means that AutoCAD has been around longer than Adobe Photoshop or even Microsoft Windows!
The 2018 release marked the 32nd major release of AutoCAD for Windows. Before AutoCAD, commercial CAD programs in the 70s ran on mainframe computers or minicomputers, with each user working at a separate graphics terminal. If the designer didn’t have access to these, they’d go about drawing using an old-school drafting desk and a t-square. Creating new versions of drawings and performing calculations took days, even weeks. Imagine how much effort it would take to compute technical calculations with calculators and mathematical tables! What’s worse, the process was fraught with opportunities for error.
Autodesk’s logo and, respectively, AutoCAD icons have changed for several versions through the years.
