A New Era for Mechanical CAD

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) has been around since the 1950s. The first graphical CAD program, called Sketchpad, came out of MIT (designworldonline.com). Since then, CAD has become essential to designing and manufacturing hardware products. Today, there are multiple types of CAD. This article focuses on mechanical CAD, used for mechanical engineering. Digging into the history of computer graphics reveals some interesting connections between the most ambitious and notorious engineers. Ivan Sutherland, who received the Turing Award for Sketchpad in 1988, had Edwin Catmull as a student.