The Introduction

By Author: endeavor
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The computer has grown to become essential in the operations of business, government, the military, engineering, and research.

It has also demonstrated itself, especially in recent years, to be a very powerful tool in design and manufacturing. In this chapter, we consider the application of computer technology to the design of a product.

That is computer-aided design or CAD. Computer-aided design involves any type of design activity which makes use of the computer to develop, analyze, or modify an engineering design. Modern CAD systems (also often called CAD/CAM systems) are based on interactive computer graphics (ICG).

Interactive computer graphics denotes a user-oriented system in which the computer is employed to create, transform, and display data in the form of pictures or symbols. The user in the computer graphics design system is the designer, who communicates data and commands to the computer through any of several input devices.

The computer communicates with the user via a cathode ray tube (CRT). The designer creates an image on the CRT screen by ...
... entering commands to call the desired software subroutines stored in the computer.

In most systems, the image is constructed out of basic geometric elements-points, lines, circles, and so on. It can be modified according to the commands of the designer enlarged, reduced in size, moved to another location on the screen, rotated, and other transformations.

Through these various manipulations, the required details of the image are formulated.The typical ICG system is a combination of hardware and software.

The hardware includes a central processing unit (CPU), one or more workstations (including the graphics display terminals), and peripheral devices such as printers, plotters, and drafting equipment.

The software consists of the computer programs needed to implement graphics processing on the system. The software would also typically include additional specialized application programs to accomplish the particular engineering functions required by the user company.

It is important to note the fact that the ICG system is one component of a computer-aided design system. The other major component is the human designer. Interactive computer graphics is a tool used by the designer to solve a design problem. In effect, the ICG system magnifies the powers of the designer.

This has been referred to as the synergistic effect. The designer performs the portion of the design process that is most suitable to human intellectual skills (conceptualization, independent thinking); the computer performs the task best suited to its capabilities (speed of calculations, visual display, storage of large amounts of data), and the resulting system exceeds the sum of its components.

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