Origins A man using AutoCAD 2.6 to digitize a drawing of a school building.ĪutoCAD was derived from a program that began in 1977, and then released in 1979 called Interact CAD, also referred to in early Autodesk documents as MicroCAD, which was written prior to Autodesk's (then Marinchip Software Partners) formation by Autodesk cofounder Michael Riddle. After discontinuing the sale of perpetual licenses in January 2016, commercial versions of AutoCAD are licensed through a term-based subscription.īefore AutoCAD was introduced, most commercial CAD programs ran on mainframe computers or minicomputers, with each CAD operator (user) working at a separate graphics terminal. Initially a DOS application, subsequent versions were later released for other platforms including Classic Mac OS (1989), Microsoft Windows (1993) and macOS (2010), along with companion web and mobile applications.ĪutoCAD is a general drafting and design application used in industry by architects, project managers, engineers, graphic designers, city planners and other professionals to prepare technical drawings. It was first released in December 1982 for the CP/M and IBM PC platforms as a desktop app running on microcomputers with internal graphics controllers. English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Polish and HungarianģD computer-aided design (CAD) software application developed by Autodesk.
