While reading a friend´s doctoral thesis about CAAD history, I discovered that most of his research was done using Internet and only Internet. In this way, only a part of the story is written, that of North-American origin, as we Europeans don't share this enthusiasm about publishing every bit of significant history. Information about European created software was completely missing. With the help of the architect and web designer Alfredo Calosci, I uploaded a large set of commercial documents...When you go to the beautifully-designed http://www.arcadecad.es/cad2/index.php site, you'll see 215 CAD manuals segregated by language, CAD package name (92), and company name (66).
While the site is in Spanish, it is sufficiently visual that you can find your way around. TIP: When you click on English, it lists the manuals written in English.
Mr Valderrama is looking for contributions to add to this repository.
I have several shelves of manuals from old CAD packages, including Mannequin, IBM CAD/3X, AutoCAD 2.17f, CorelCAD, Trispectives 3D/eye, GT Express (a display driver), VDraft, and DynaCADD.
Update
Mr Valderrama clarifies that commercial software manuals are not reproduced due to copyright concerns. Instead, they have posted marketing materials and so on.
If you wish to contribute, you can send scans as PDFs to fvalderrama@presto.es or alfredoc@negot.net
You'll on this subject a museum of CAD related material here http://exmateria.ning.com/photo/albums/le-musee-autodesk
Old floppy disks (why do I say old?), Old books, dongles
Posted by: Patrick EMIN | Apr 20, 2010 at 09:51 AM
ok i followd th link http://www.arcadecad.es/cad2/index.php and one of many things that i didn't see was software like solidworks, inventor, mechanical CAD software.
Posted by: me | Apr 20, 2010 at 10:07 AM
CAAD stands for "Computer Aided Architectural Design"
Anyway, CAD documents are also welcome.
Posted by: Fernando G. Valderrama | Apr 21, 2010 at 08:10 AM