Applicon
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Applicon, Incorporated was one of the first manufacturers of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (
Gary Hornbuckle was President of Applicon until it was sold to Schlumberger.[7] During the 1970s and early 1980s, the company had its headquarters and R&D facility in Burlington, Massachusetts, while its manufacturing facility was in Billerica, Massachusetts. Applicon was acquired by Schlumberger in 1980, at which point Richardson and Hornbuckle left the company. At the time, Applicon had over $100 million in annual revenue.
In 1986 Schlumberger management combined its Applicon division with another entity which it had acquired, Manufacturing Data Systems, Inc. (MDSI), to create the Schlumberger CAD/CAM division, siting its main office in
Early systems
Early Applicon products (circa 1970s) ran on DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. Applicon modified the DEC operating system, which was then a single-user OS, to one of the world's first multi-user operating systems. One of DEC's first multi-user OS was created with help from Applicon. (DEC's first multi-user DEC operating system was reportedly its RSTS-11 (Resource Sharing Time Sharing), which had been created for the educational marketplace).
Another Applicon innovation was the ability to input commands using drawn character recognition. (See Patent 4560830). Early CAD provided a stylus and tablet instead of a mouse for a user interface. The tablet was mapped to the screen i.e. the top-left and bottom-right of the screen and the tablet were mapped to the same points.
Applicon provided the ability to train the system to interpret characters drawn on the tablet and to associate them with commands to the system. For example, drawing the symbol for alpha could mean "execute". Commands could consist of more than one symbol, for example two dots could be interpreted as "move relative" which would move the currently selected items by the distance between points p1 and p2 where the dots indicate the location of the points. The character recognition worked only because multiple symbol shapes were mapped to each command. 2 and Z would be nearly indistinguishable by the system. To tell the difference, multiple strokes would be required. ".2" ".Z" might be mapped to "2" while "/2" and "/Z" would be mapped to "Z" Any error a user made drawing a command sketch could trigger a command the user was not expecting. This was an irritant because of the large number of poorly documented User Defined (community contributed) commands contained in the software package. A user suspecting they'd drawn wrong would invariably continue to randomly scribble in order to avoid any possible matches.
At this time, Applicon's software was written entirely in DEC's
In the mid to late 1970s, Applicon systems were used to design
Bravo! could have had the first integrated
The end of Applicon came in 1989 when it partnered with
References
- ISBN 9781447149323.
- ^ "Chapter 7: Applicon" (PDF). CAD History. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 March 2022. Retrieved 27 May 2018.
- ^ "Distinguished alumni and friends - hall of fame - Fontaine K. Richardson". College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 27 May 2018.
- ^ "Gary D. Hornbuckle's Obituary on Monterey Herald". Monterey Herald. Retrieved 27 May 2018.
- ^ "Giving to MIT". M.I.T.
- ^ "Celebrating a half century of MIT entrepreneurship - The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship". The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. 21 November 2016. Retrieved 27 May 2018.
- ^ Hornbuckle, G.D. (1967). The computer graphics user/machine interface, IEEE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, 8(1), 17 - 20
- ^ "Applicon Names Vance Diggins President and CEO". 8 December 1993. Archived from the original on 18 August 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2012.
- ^ "Unigraphics Acquires CAD/CAM Veteran Applicon". Computergram International. ComputerWire. 12 August 1999. Retrieved 10 January 2008.