DAC-1

DAC-1, for Design Augmented by Computer, was one of the earliest graphical computer aided design systems. Developed by General Motors, IBM was brought in as a partner in 1960 and the two developed the system and released it to production in 1963. It was publicly unveiled at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Detroit 1964. GM used the DAC system, continually modified, into the 1970s when it was succeeded by CADANCE.

GM was an early computer user, using punched card machines as early as 1952 for engineering analysis. In 1955 they moved their computing services into the new Data Processing department of GM Research Laboratories. In 1956, together with North American Aviation, they developed the first "official" batch processing operating system for IBM systems, GM-NAA I/O. In 1958 they were one of the earliest users of IBM's new FORTRAN compiler.

In June 1958 GM Research started a program to better understand the problems and potential improvements in the industrial design process. The team found that each step of the process -from initial conception and body styling through engineering design and finally to detailed parts drawings- used different types of diagrams. Each division within the company had to have their own drawing departments to support them. Time was being lost, and errors introduced, when the diagrams moved from one department to another and had to be re-drawn into the local format. Even the task of looking up the diagrams in the engineering libraries represented a significant amount of time. When modifications were made to drawings, this process repeated itself.

Convinced that automation was a solution to at least some of these problems, in 1959 Donald Hart tasked the Data Processing department of GM Research to start developing a system to store diagrams for rapid retrieval and simple modifications. The idea was that the diagrams would be digitized into the computer, displayed interactively to allow rotations, scaling and projections, and then printed on demand. Lookups would be handled via punched card queries, which would allow operators to quickly retrieve documents for manipulation into whatever local format the user needed, and then print it. Repetitive queries could be automated simply by saving the card stack.

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