It’s amazing to think that AutoCAD came into being over two decades ago,
at a time when most people thought that personal computers weren’t
capable of industrial-strength tasks like CAD. (The acronym stands for
Computer-Aided Drafting, Computer-Aided Design, or both, depending on
whom you talk to.) It’s almost as amazing that, more than 20 years after its
birth, AutoCAD remains the king of the microcomputer CAD hill by a tall
margin. Many competing CAD programs have come to challenge AutoCAD;
many have fallen, and a few are still around. One hears rumblings that the
long-term future of CAD may belong to special-purpose, 3D-based software
such as the Autodesk Inventor and Revit programs. Whether those rumblings
amplify into a roar remains to be seen, but for the present and the near future
anyway, AutoCAD is where the CAD action is.
