Unless designing or drafting is in your line of work you might not necessarily know what CAD is. You're not alone. Even in today's world where it seems that every second person is a computer genius, there are still plenty of people for whom a lot of jargon travels way over their heads. I share their pain or embarrassment, because its no joke being the only one in the room who doesn't get the computer hacker joke and as result ends up smiling with a dull blank expression on her face and nodding like an idiot.
CAD stands for Computer Aided Design, it used to stand for Computer Aided Drafting but was changed because as it improved, it evolved to do more than just drafting. It is also know as CAID - Computer Aided Industrial Design and CAAD - Computer Aided Architectural Design.
The programme was created to design and develop products, which can be goods used by consumers. It is also used in the design of tools and machinery that manufacture components, as well as in the drafting and design of buildings. It is used throughout the entire engineering process from the onset of conceptual design and layout all the way through to the definition of manufacturing methods of components. Another important way in which it can be used is in the detailed engineering of 3D models and 2D drawings of physical components.
An area where CAD has gained significant importance is Computer Aided Technologies. The advancements in this field have included a reduction in product development costs and shorter time spent on the design cycle.
CAD can be used in a number of different ways, depending on the task at hand, the profession of the user, as well as the type of software that is run. CAD comes in a variety of systems, and each requires a different pattern of thought on how to use it to maximum benefit. In addition, each system's virtual components must also be designed in a different way.
CAD generally operates on computers that are Windows based, although some systems run on hardware that uses Unix operating systems and a few work with Linux. There are a few CAD systems e.g. Ocad and NX that provide multi-platform support and these include Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OSX.
In order to use CAD it is generally not necessary to obtain any special hardware other than a high-end OpenGL based Graphics card. If you are going to be doing complex designs then you will need computers with high speed CPUs and large amounts of RAM. A computer mouse is used as the human-machine interface, although a pen and digitising graphics tablet can also be used.
Once a programme like this has been created and become so well used and mainstream, it is difficult to imagine a time when it wasn't used. What did people do before CAD? They had to do everything by hand. It was painstaking work. At times it could be frustrating because even the smallest mistake could set you back days. I wonder what their level of job satisfaction was like? These days CAD developers strive to make future work on the project as simple as possible. They need a very good understanding of the system in order to do this. After all, extra time spent now could mean great savings later.
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