This afternoon John Hirshtick spoke to the media about the history of CAD over the last 50 years. John took us through a journey of the beginnings of CAD from way back in 1963, up to Solidworks 2008, and beyond. When Solidworks was first started as Winchester Design in the early 90's, they had three keys that they felt was imperative to building a great product and company:
- Put the power of 3D on every engineers desktop
- Build an extremely strong business-profitable, growing
- Treat their customers, resellers, solutions partners, and employees with dignity and respect
Using those three rules, Solidworks has grown into the company it is today. John gave what he thought was the future of CAD:
- Reliability
- Speed
- Ease-of-use
- Data Exchange
- Drafting
- Geometric Modeling
In terms of future trends of CAD that are favorites of John's:
- Hosted Computing (CAD programs running on the web)
- Open Source
- Video Games (Using various aspects of gaming tech to influence CAD tools)
- Touch Interfaces
- 3D Printing
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