History of CAD – David Weisberg

> Lemon felt strongly that timesharing systems were the wave of the future and that SDRC should focus on providing software on these systems rather than license its software for a one-time fee. Initially, the company sold ANSYS and NASTRAN on a timesharing basis using computers operated by U. S. Steel.

SDRC did SaaS in the 1970s, before SaaS was cool.

> In September 1994 the company announced that it would be restating its revenues and earning for 1992 through the first half of 1994 to include a $30 million charge relating to sales discrepancies in its Asian operations [...] The company immediately terminated Tony Tolani, a vice president and general manager of SDRC’s Far Eastern Operations.

I was going to say they cooked the books before it was cool, too, but that's a much older trick. They claimed they sold all this software while in reality they just dumped it in some warehouse at the Cincinnati airport. Then proceeded to sell their shares before shit hit fan. SEC link with more details: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/litreleases/lr15325.txt

That is to say the downright corrupt and shady sales and management team almost killed the company. It recovered eventually and ended up being bought by EDS

> While the software’s geometric modeling capabilities were improved it was the package’s user interface that really impressed me. Icon menus typically were only two levels deep compared to five and six levels in other systems [...] I wrote in the April 1995 issue of EAReport: “I-DEAS has the best interactive user interface available today for mechanical design and analysis.

I agree. Its interface would look odd and clunky by today's metrics and might even been considered unusual at that time, but it was really nice to use after some practice. They seemingly put some effort into its design.

Good counter on John Walker's "The Autodesk File" https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

I recently learned that there is a free community edition of Solid Edge: https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/download-solid-edge-c...

According to the History of CAD Solid Edge originally came from Intergraph. Many packages/kernels seem to have changed hands over the course of decades.

I'll have to work through the 650 pages.

I use CATIA v5 every day, first released in 1998. It's sharp and crusty and huge, but does everything (with the right license).