Patrick J. Hanratty
| Patrick J. Hanratty | |
|---|---|
| Residence | United States |
| Alma mater | University of California, Irvine |
| Known for | computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing |
| Spouse(s) | Sandra |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | computer science |
| Institutions | General Electric, General Motors Research Laboratories, Manufacturing and Consulting Services |
Patrick J. Hanratty is an American computer scientist and businessperson who is known as the "Father of CAD/CAM"—computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing. As of 2013[update] he is President and CEO of Manufacturing and Consulting Services (MCS) of Scottsdale, Arizona, a company he founded. According to the University of California in 2012, industry analysts think that "70 percent of all 3-D mechanical CAD/CAM systems available today trace their roots back to Hanratty’s original code".
Hanratty earned a PhD from the University of California, Irvine. He worked for General Electric, where in 1957 he wrote Pronto, an early commercial numerical control programming language. Then he moved in 1961 to General Motors Research Laboratories where he helped to develop DAC, (Design Automated by Computer).
Around the mid-1950s Hanratty and a team from the Stanford Research Institute using equipment built by the General Electric Computer Laboratory developed standardized machine-readable characters for use on bank checks. Adopted by the American Bankers Association in 1958, their characters are still in use and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) and the E-13B font became standard in the industry.
In 1970 he founded his own company, where he learned valuable lessons. Hanratty later said, "Never generate anything closely coupled to a specific architecture. And make sure you keep things open to communicate with other systems, even your competitors." The business, called ICS, failed because its product, a CAD/CAM drafting system, was tied to a computer that very few people had available, and because its product was written in TPL, an unfamiliar language for most people.
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