John, before Autocad and Intergraph became dominant, there was CADAM, Cadance, CATIA, CALMA, Unigraphics, and more¡ The first gen of CAD was made in-house by the aerospace companies and big car companies, then they sold the stuff on the open market. ?I started with Unigraphics (McDonald Douglas) when a single workstation circa 1987 cost about $100k. It was amazingly crude by today¡¯s standards, but I did 3D models including shaded rendering back then. ?It was unbelievably advanced at the time. ?A couple of the modern software are direct descendants of that era (Solidworks for example) but most of those bit the dust by the late 90¡¯s.
