CAD makes life easier for every Engineer and Designer, but it wasn't that way decades ago. Before AutoCAD was introduced in 1982, drafting cars, houses or consumer products was tedious and time-consuming. Andy Logan, Principal Designer at Frog Design (famous for their work on the Apple II) had this to say about CAD in 2007, "It puts all this power into your hands. One designer can do what it took two or three to do before." If you look back at history, you discover that the desire to make a concept a reality has driven the development of CAD. The desire to connect and collaborate is the reason why GrabCAD exists too, because we always need new tools to carrying out new ideas.
Gaudi
Antoni Gaudi is one of the best known architects of the 19th and 20th centuries. His organic and natural architectual style set him apart from everyone else. The Sagrada Familia, Parc Güell and Casa Milá used architectural elements that were difficult to conceive via traditional paper and pen methods. Furthermore, calculating all the loads had to be done without a single computer - not even a decent calculator. Gaudi had to go farther than his colleagues, inventing a primitive but effective method of calculating loads by attaching weights to a loose mesh to stretch it. He would take a picture, turn it upside down and then begin to paint over it, in a way 'rendering' the scale model. This proto-CAD methods gave Gaudi the sort of help he needed to ensure that his designs would be structurally sound without sacrificing the aesthetic appeal.
SketchPAD
Before SketchUp, Solidworks or AutoCAD, there was SketchPad. Developed by MIT professor Ivan Sutherland is 1963, SketchPad was the first object-oriented program, utilizing the first graphic user interface and programmed with the first non-procedural programming language. The hardware was a light pen, a CRT screen (akin to an ordinary TV) and a Lincoln Tx-2 computer with an tepid 64K of memory (your electronic alarm clock probably has more memory). Yet one could draw, constrain angles, create simple parametric curves, set tolerance, copy, paste - all of the essential elements of a CAD-drawing. Watching this video defies imagination that this could have been even possible 20 years before AutoCAD debut.
http://youtu.be/mOZqRJzE8xg
oN-Line System
SketchPad was recognized as a revolutionary idea then, inspiring Douglas Englebart to create the NSL (oN-Line System) in 1968, the first computer to use a mouse, video conferencing, bitmapped screens and a useful little technique called hyperlinking. It was an incredible step forward for using computers as a collaborative tool but was never widely accepted due to its unfriendly user interface.
If Gaudi, SketchPad or the NLS have anything to teach us today, its that a great Designer or Engineer should never have to feel limited by the tools at their disposal. The best ones try new ones to create new things. As Andy Logan said, CAD software has multiplied the power of one person. With the power of thousands of engineers working together on projects, there's no telling what could be done.
