agers and chief executive officers (CEOs) to imple-
ment the technology. Doing so was a big risk for
some firms and a drastic change for all of them. In
1962, Ivan Sutherland at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) outlined the need for com-
puter graphics to be used in manufacturing in his
doctoral thesis. His contemporary at MIT, Steve
Coons, began to market the idea using computer
graphics in engineering as a synergistic process be-
tween human and computer. He gave the idea a la-
bel: CAD.
From Academia to Industry The push to adopt
CAD technology thus began at MIT. Much of the rest
of academia embraced the concept, and as early as
1964 the University of Michigan and the University
of Detroit sponsored a short course in the new tech-
nology, with Coons serving as one of the principal
lecturers. MIT, the University of California, Los An-
geles (UCLA), and the Tennessee Space Institute
followed suit, and by the late 1970’s, many of the na-
tion’s top engineering schools were teaching short
courses in CAD and serving as centers for its re-
search and development.
While scholars continued to embrace CAD and
CAM, General Motors and Lockheed-Georgia, using
hardware manufactured by International Business
Machines (IBM), had implemented the first fully
functional CAD systems by 1966. Throughout the
1970’s, Boeing, the U.S. Air Force (USAF), the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), and General Dynamics, among a few others,
began to implement the technology, with NASA and
the USAF practicing ways to share graphics data be-
tween computers. These were similar to the local area
network (LAN) system developed by the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in the 1970’s.
In the early 1980’s, CAD scholars and users began
to develop user manuals for CAD and CAM. By the
middle of the 1980’s, the Society of Manufacturing
Engineers (SME), which has thousands of members
in academia and corporate America, coined the
term CIM (computer-integrated manufacturing) and
established that CAD and CAM technology could be
applied to all facets of the manufacturing process.
Combined with CAE (computer-aided engineering),
which focused on the analysis and testing of a CAD
design, CAD, CAM, and CIM, formed the C4 con-
cept that revolutionized manufacturing by the end
of the 1980’s.
Obstacles and Incentives Though LAN network-
ing made the process more practical and computers
had become somewhat more affordable by the early
1980’s, most CEOs and business managers still did
not believe CAD and CAM implementation to be
cost effective. Many saw the technology as some-
thing only giant companies such as General Motors,
Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, and Lockheed could
afford. For businesspeople, the incentive for CAD
and CAM began in the late 1970’s through the early
1980’s, as inefficiency in U.S. manufacturing threat-
ened to weaken the economy relative to Japan and
Western Europe. This danger was partly due to waste
and profit loss caused by overproduction, poor qual-
ity, high design costs, frugal consumers, lengthy
production times, a lack of synergy between small
suppliers and large manufacturers, and a sudden
consumer demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient
automobiles. Managers understood that CAD and
CAM could begin to remedy some of these prob-
lems, but the extra financial burdens and the orga-
nizational stress of adopting these robust systems
weighed against their wholehearted acceptance.
Three specific financial drawbacks were the costs
of implementation, training, and system mainte-
nance. Because these processes could cost much
more than the initial purchase of the CAD/CAM
hardware and software and because management
had to restructure entire companies around the new
processes, adopting those processes was a precarious
decision, and many decided against it. Furthermore,
there was an ethical problem to consider. CAD/
CAM scholars and business managers knew that
drafting and materials-handling jobs would be lost
to machines. That ethical dilemma has never been
solved; however, the financial concerns were re-
duced by the late 1980’s. Vast improvements in net-
working, chip design, processor speed and capacity,
software capabilities, and computer design made
adopting the C4 system an easier decision. The
prices of software and hardware began to decrease,
and implementation, training, and maintenance
became less costly as they grew slightly less time-
consuming and confusing. Furthermore, the suc-
cess of the first companies to adopt the technology
in the mid-1980’s provided an added incentive for
their competitors to emulate them in the late 1980’s.Impact CAD, CAM, CAE, and CIM became neces-
sary technologies for nearly all manufacturers, fromThe Eighties in America CAD/CAM technology 169