MECH WORLD

Imagine being able to walk through your new home or office building, go into every room, try out different colors on the walls or make changes to the design – before it’s even built. It sounds pretty amazing, and it is. That is the world of CAD (Computer-Aided Design) drafting. Not too long ago you would find the designer or architect bent over a drafting table using a pencil, ruler and eraser, slowly drafting every detail by hand. Today’s designers use sleek, super-fast computers and CAD software systems that can quickly and perfectly create, edit, then display finished projects in breathtaking 3-D computer renderings.  There are other software systems with similar acronyms, but they are essentially the same application with subtle differences in function. Two of these other systems, CADD (Computer-Aided Design and Drafting) and CAID (Computer-Aided Industrial Design) are the most commonly used.  From the minute you get up in the morning, almost everything you will ...

Designers have long used computers for their calculations.  Digital computers  were used in power system analysis or optimization as early as proto-" Whirlwind " in  1949 . Circuit   design  theory, or  power network  methodology would be  algebraic ,  symbolic , and often  vector -based. Examples of problems being solved in the mid-1940s to 50s include, Servo motors controlled by generated pulse (1949), The digital computer with built-in compute operations to automatically co-ordinate transforms to compute radar related vectors (1951) and the essentially graphic mathematical process of forming a shape with a digital machine tool (1952). These were accomplished with the use of computer software. The man credited with coining the term CAD.   Douglas T. Ross  stated "As soon as I saw the interactive display equipment, [being used by radar operators 1953]. The designers of these very early computers built utility...