The most influential voices in CAD are not always the ones who wrote the software. Sometimes they are the people who used it, often found it lacking, and documented it all. When CAD publishers honored CAD companies, Steve called them out. 

That’s why I wanted Steve Wolfe on the History of CAD podcast. Steve built The CAD Report, a paid CAD newsletter that was dreaded by CAD vendors and indispensable to CAD shoppers. 

Steve’s engineering education began at Northwestern and  continued at MIT. It's not all about CAD: a master’s thesis experiment on sea ice and what happens when oil gets trapped underneath. Then there are 9 years as an engineer with Electric Boat. After that came the newsletter.

We touch the early commercial CAD landscape, the rise of Autodesk and AutoCAD, and how proprietary CAD data formats can hold an industry hostage for decades. 

We also get practical and current: why CAD user interface design still struggles compared to fast sketching and design exploration on paper, why 2D thinking never went away, and how 3D modeling plus CAM and CNC can make parts fit the first time. Finally, we look at AI in CAD and AI for everything else… Like all the paper issues of the CAD report. 

If you want to go deep into the Wild West of CAD in the late 70s and 80s, and you appreciate strong opinions, you'll want to share this episode.