Cambridge Interactive Systems

MEDUSA, (since 2004 MEDUSA4) is a CAD program used in the areas of mechanical and plant engineering by manufacturers and Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) companies. The system's history is closely tied to the beginnings of mainstream CAD and the research culture fostered by Cambridge University and the UK government as well as the resulting transformation of Cambridge into a world-class tech centre in the 1980s.

MEDUSA is based on a platform-independent kernel which, combined with a platform-independent user interface based on the Qt (framework) (with XML for Administration and Web-based client-server communication for data management) allows for a high degree of systems and platform flexibility. The software is available on Windows, Linux and Solaris.

The 4th Generation of the MEDUSA 2D and 3D CAD product family was released by the company CAD Schroer in the summer of 2004. Various software modules and packages have been developed, with MEDUSA4 DRAFTING PLUS, a 2D CAD program with all the standard 2D design functionality and BACIS1 and BACIS2 customisation tools as the base product.

MEDUSA has had a checkered history in the CAD world, which began in Cambridge, UK in the 1970s. MEDUSA’s history is tied in with the Computer-Aided Design Centre (or CADCentre) which was created in Cambridge in 1967 by the UK Government to carry out CAD research.

British computer scientist Dr. Dick Newell worked there on a language-driven 3D plant design system called PDMS (Plant Design Management System).

In 1977, Dr. Dick Newell together with colleague Tom Sancha, left the CADCentre to form a company called Cambridge Interactive Systems or CIS and primarily concentrated on 2D CAD. CIS had developed an electrical cabling solution initially called CABLOS, which was first purchased by Dowty Engineering in about 1979. Another early adopter was BMW, which used the system for car wiring diagrams. CABLOS soon became known and sold as the MEDUSA drafting system under CIS concentrating initially on schematic drafting. A 2D interaction based 3D modelling system was developed based on a 3rd party 3D engine (Euclid). This used an interaction mechanism embedded in 2D drawings of a form which was meaningful to designers and which could benefit from existing parametric facilities to provide parametric 3D modelling. The proprietary programming language with which MEDUSA version 1 was developed was known as LCIS. Around this time, the company also began developing its own 3D modelling kernel for MEDUSA.