TurboCAD

TurboCAD is a CAD software application for 2D and 3D design and drafting which runs on Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

TurboCAD Pro Basic and Platinum editions contain general drafting tools, as well as tools for 3D architectural and mechanical design. Both editions can create ACIS Solids or TC Surface objects, as well as Surface Meshes. The Basic edition contains a limited set of architectural and mechanical tools, whereas Platinum contains all the tools.
For less demanding users, a less expensive TurboCAD Deluxe 2D / 3D version is available. Its 3D tools are TC Surface tools, and it has a limited amount of architectural and mechanical tools.
For users needing only 2D functionality, there is the much less expensive TurboCAD Designer. With the exception of TurboCAD Designer, the other TurboCAD releases support both 2D drafting and 3D modeling tools.

The Mac versions of the software are built on a separate codebase and are not directly comparable with the Windows versions. TurboCAD Mac Pro contains both 2D and 3D tools, while the standard version is for 2D drafting only.

TurboCAD was originally developed in South Africa by Hendrik Vermooten and Hein Oosthuizen. Initial hardware support was for a specific device configuration: Hercules monochrome graphics cards, HP7475 plotters with keyboard for data entry. The first version of TurboCAD fitted on a single 360kb floppy disk so that it could run on the original IBM PC. The source code also fitted on a single floppy disk along with the 30kb required by the “development environment”: Turbo Pascal 2.0.