ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards’s The Initial Graphics Exchange Specification, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. In 1979, a series of events catalyzed the CAD vendor and user community to create the first national standard for Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data exchange, which is documented in the report Initial Graphics Exchange Specification, Version 1.0. The Initial Graphics Exchange Specification is the US national standard for the exchange of data between dissimilar CAD systems. Drawings created with CAD tools, which were introduced in the 1960s, represented tremendous productivity gains over paper drawings, such as ease to revise and archive. CAD tools also opened new opportunities, such as enabling manufacturing instructions to be derived automatically and executed directly from the drawing.
