From Graphical Computation to Present CAD Systems. an Historical Vision of the Revolution Produced in the Systems of Graphical Representation (1966-1998)

Throughout these pages are made known the persons, the projects and the books that have influenced my actions and that they will be mentioned in form underlined in this paper. I have to emphasize that since 1965 to 1970, and in the continuous search that I was accomplishing to find data and bibliography adapted to the topic of computer graphics, only two series of publications contained topics related to this matter at that time: one was the IBM Journal and the other series was the communications of the ACM. The purpose of this work is to make known an experience accomplished throughout 30 years of intense activity in finding new methods of drawing and design, based on the use of digital computers, mainly in Argentina, and during certain periods of time in Great Britain and since 1971 during short visits to the United States and also in France. The first idea emerged in the year 1965 when I was assistant teacher at the School of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires, as a combination of ideas between the concepts of spatial geometry and the current morphological studies that we taught in the Course of professor Gaston Breyer. However the idea of automatic drawing emerged observing the operation of the first scientific digital computer installed in the Computing Institute of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires in 1963 (Sadosky 1963). At the beginning, the approach to the computer were not accomplished from a strictly scientific point of view, but it was implying a kind of "sincresis" (Koheler 1940) it is more than a synthesis, because I was tried to combine ideas that have had its origin in different worlds of thinking, the analogous world and the digital world, and this situation was very difficult to accept at that time.The designing procedures in the decade 1960's was deeply rooted (and still continues) in the architectural design field as a result of a drawing process based in heuristic techniques