Under the leadership of Dean of Engineering Tom Everhart and Professor Greenberg, a Computer Aided Design Instructional Facility (CADIF) was established in 1981. The first goal of this facility was to educate each one of Cornell’s 2,000 undergraduate engineering students with at least one course in Computer Aided Design. The second goal was to “go out of business”. If CADIF was successful we then thought that each department in the engineering college would want to have its own interactive CAD systems.

 

One of the early hypothesis depended on the development of common software which could run on state-of-the-art vector displays produced by Evans and Sutherland, uniquely designed frame buffers produced by Grinnell systems as well as Techtronics storage tube displays. The manager of this facility was Doctor John Dill from General Motors who was instrumental in enabling the facility to reach its goals. Early CAD applications included structural engineering, water resource planning, engineering mathematics, and computer graphics to name a few.