25 Years of Solidworks History

For those who are struggling in the field of design, especially product design, industrial design, engineering design, and other CAD designs may be familiar with the name of software Solidworks.

Yes, Solidworks which is a software design engineering that is quite complete and quite easy to use and has a fairly complete ability, though still not optimal if used in the world of architectural or interior design.

It turned out that SolidWorks was developed on December 30, 1993. At that time the Unix Workstation platform was quite widely used but the price was quite expensive and only affordable by the elite where this Unix platform usually has complete facilities including for graphic design, engineering design and so on.

At that time SolidWorks were quite attractive to the technical world because SolidWorks was developed on the Microsoft Windows platform and were available to almost everyone.

In the 1980s, the price of CAD (computer-aided design) software could cost hundreds of millions of rupiah. CAD software vendor vendors at that time not only sold the software alone but with tables and chairs at the same time

Then in 1995 when the Windows 95 era began, the spread of PCs (personal computers) that used the Microsoft Windows operating system more than the Unix Workstation. This is partly because Windows makes it easy for users who can’t feel Unix users at the time, for example, Microsoft Windows allows users to check the printing process by clicking on the icon and checking the work order, while Unix forces users to remember and type their commands at the command prompt.

Over time the development of PCs was more than Unix and Solidworks was developed for Windows platforms instead of Unix.

At that time there were also those who were skeptical that CAD software would not be able to run on Windows and would not be able to run fast so people would not switch to windows.

Initially, Solidworks was called Winchester Design Systems

When it was first established, SolidWorks was not originally called SolidWorks but were called “Winchester Design Systems”, why is it called Winchester, because one of the founders of SolidWorks lived in the Edward Drive area in Winchester, United States.

Another name that originally used SolidWorks was “OmniCAD” but the name was changed because it might sound like the name of an evil conglomerate in the movie “Iron Man”.

After that another name that almost used SolidWorks is “powerCAD” but again it was changed because the name sounds like a nutritional supplement that can be mixed with milkshakes.

Then there are other alternative names such as PowerWave, CADWorks, VisualCAD, PowerView, and others.

One of the founders even wrote and hung the alternative names on the wall of his office to test whether the name was right and felt good to hear.

That said, the word SolidWorks was used when one of the founders of SolidWorks played with words in his notebook in 1994 during the VAR Daratech Conference and found the fragments of the word “Solid” and the word “Works” more easily heard together.

Solidworks was built before the internet era like now, besides that Solidworks which has a Solidworks.com website address including 100,000 of the world’s first web.

One of the features possessed by SolidWorks is Feature Manager, which turns out to be one of the standard features that many other CAD software based on parametric design, maybe CAD software that is Freeform modeling is not so using Feature Manager as SolidWorks, I don’t really know whether before Solidworks introduces the feature manager whether other CAD software already has this feature or not. But from the information of one of the founders of SolidWorks, that Feature Manager did not exist in other CAD software before SolidWorks was present, although there was a Feature manager but it was not like the feature manager in SolidWorks and indeed the Feature manager in SolidWorks was very helpful in the process of designing various 3D forms that were quite complex and facilitate the editing process of the stages of making 3D designs.

Feature Manager Solidworks

Solidworks is not only for 3D / 2D CAD design but can also be used for FEA simulations, thermal analysis, motion, weight calculation, area, volume, etc. from the designs we have made so that many learn SolidWorks because they can be a simulation tool of physical conditions which we will actually create. Solidworks tutorials are also quite a lot on the internet to learn SolidWorks from basic to advanced levels. In the next article, I might try to review or write a tutorial about using SolidWorks and applications in the field. So what are you waiting for, let’s learn SolidWorks right now :)