On February 20, Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach presented progress on his “Experimental Archaeology of CAD Project” to students and faculty in the CMU History Department. The project examines the development of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems through a combination of historical, ethnographic, and creative technology prototyping methods.
The project includes a study of CAD software emulations supported by a small grant from the EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure) project at Yale University obtained by Prof. Cardoso in collaboration with University of California Irvine Computer Science Prof. Eric Kaltman. Developed in parallel with Prof. Cardoso's seminar 48-749 Experimental Archaeology of CAD, the project's team includes Emek Erdolu (PhD-CD), Jinmo Rhee (PhD-CD), and Erik Ulberg (MS-CD), and CMU fellow in software curation Zachary Furste.
The team has researched and reconstructed several pioneering systems including Sketchpad (Ivan Sutherland, 1963); URBAN5 (Nicolas Negroponte, 1967); CISP (Chris Yessios, 1973); and the "Coons Patch" (Steve A. Coons, c1967). Some of the project's outputs will be showcased in forthcoming exhibitions in Montreal, Berlin, and Los Angeles.