CAD/CAM and its value

CAD stands for Computer-Aided Design. We can think of a number of ways in which computers could aid designers. These are: 1. Performing design calculations 2. Producing and managing parts lists 3. Storing and retrieving design information 4. Producing drawings 5. Producing programs for numerically controlled (NC) machine tools Design calculations and parts list processing were the first applications. They were fairly obvious things to use computers for since they involved processing well organised data in well defined ways and the data was just text and numbers.