In fact, there has been 31 versions since the first release in December 1982! Over the years, Autodesk added new features and programs to appeal to different professions. In its 35 years, AutoCAD has grown substantially. By March 1986, only four years after it was introduced, AutoCAD had become the most widely used design application worldwide, a position it still holds today.īack in 1982, AutoCAD was sold on floppy disks! (Source: ) They launched AutoCAD at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas as the first CAD program in the world to run on a PC. Their flagship product turned out to be AutoCAD. He and the other 15 co-founders intended to develop five different desktop automation applications, hoping that one of the applications would take off. The company behind AutoCAD, Autodesk was founded in 1982 by John Walker. Imagine how much effort it would take to compute technical calculations with calculators and mathematical tables! What’s worse, the process was fraught with opportunities for error. Creating new versions of drawings and performing calculations took days, even weeks.

If the designer didn’t have access to these, they’d go about drawing using an old-school drafting desk and a t-square.

Early AutoCAD workstation (Source: Ohio State University)

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