The Engineering Design Revolution, a history of CAD and summarisation of the website CadHistory.net, has been adopted by Shapr3D as a means of protecting the writings of its author, the late David E. Weisberg.
Documenting over 80 years of computer aided design, the writings have long been of a personal interest to Shapr3D CEO István Csanády, who approached Weisberg’s family to republish the author’s work.
“Over the years I learned a lot about CAD, but some of my most important insights came from a website called CadHistory(.net). It was a basically a book, written by David E. Weisberg about the history of CAD. Unfortunately Mr. Weisberg passed away a few years ago, and the website got abandoned,” explains Csanády. “We reached out to his relatives, and they kindly let us republish his work on our website.
“If you are interested in the world of design and engineering software, it’s an invaluable read.”
Shapr3D describes the writings by Weisberg as having the benefit of choosing to tell the story of CAD at the right moment. By still being able to interview the first key figures of a nascent technology, Weisberg gave a recollection of events, landmarks, and actors with accuracy that would be unattainable today.
The digital edition of the original tome of around 650 pages is broken down into separate blog posts, as per the author’s original chapters. “By hosting this all-encompassing timeline of the history of CAD, we hope to offer our readers the in-depth look at the very origins of the industry, all the way to the early ’00s and modern-era CAD,” explains Csanády.
An early CAD pioneer, MIT graduate David E. Weisberg first served in the U.S. military developing computer graphics pertaining to missile guidance systems, then spent his career in developing CAD, CAE and CAM software (notably at Auto-trol) before switching to journalism and writing about the industry.
You can read all the chapters here.
