ABSTRACT
The engineering profession was slower in its use of computer-aided design and drafting (CADD). One of the milestones in the development of CADD was the work done by Ivan Sutherland, whose 1963 MIT doctoral thesis describing Sketch-Pad contains some of the data structures that laid the theoretical basis for CADD. The 1980s saw a rapid increase in the use of CADD in the design of robotic functions and manufacturing techniques, including computer display and computer-aided manufacturing instructions for machine tool operations. A CADD workstation accepts symbolic values from a processor and converts this input into physical values through electrical signals that are translated into video display tube line segments. Any software system that accepts a numerical value as an input and converts it to a physical value and its movement as an output is providing CADD format. AutoSketch is a product for CADD users.
