Wikipedia states: “Computer-aided design (CAD), also known as computer-aided design and drafting (CADD),[1] is the use of computer systems to assist in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design.[2] Computer-aided drafting describes the process of creating a technical drawing with the use of computer software.[3] “

However CAD has been around a lot longer than Wikipedia and the idiots that think the world revolves around software and a drawing is the end-product are simply wrong. Producing a drawing is just one of many steps from conception to the production of a finished product. In fact, one can use computers to produce a product with no drawing involved at all.

Elsevier has a journal on CAD:
“Computer-Aided Design is a leading international journal that provides academia and industry with key papers on research and developments in the application of computers to design.

• Foundational theories, frameworks, methodologies, and standards
• Geometric and topological methods for shape and solid modeling
• Structural, material and physical modeling
• Virtual reality and prototyping methods
• Advanced support of manufacturing and downstream activities of product realization
• User interfaces, system interfaces and system interoperability
• Knowledge-intensive technologies for design
• Design databases, knowledge repositories, object libraries and retrieval
• Modeling and design of multi-scale objects and systems
• Specific applications and significant benchmarks of computer aided design
• Emergent issues of advanced design support
• Uncertainty and imprecision in computer-aided design”

Some of that is relevant to producing a drawing but most is not.

In a particular case I did, the beam-buncher, the design involved the concept of combining two wave-forms to produce an electric field with the right time-dependence to do the job. The sine-wave was suboptimal so we added a second harmonic and used computers to simulate the behaviour of the original design and the improved design. Then we had to design a structure that would give the required spatial variation for the electric field. That involved electric field calculations. Then we had to make it fit inside the existing mounting which did involve a drawing. Then I had to design the electronics to generate the second harmonic component with the proper voltage ratios. That too, involved paper calculations and computer simulations. The result was that less than 10% of the work was making a drawing, yet computers were used for everything except the drawing and the lathe-work and soldering. The process took 30 days to simulate and 3 days for the actual manufacture. The device worked exactly as predicted and improved the output of the machine at highest energy five-fold in spite of scepticism from my boss. He told me stories of how it had been tried before and failed. The computers and I proved him wrong. You can buy the article I wrote on the subject in peer-reviewed literature here.

Will you please stop this infantile editorializing?

“There are lots of ways computers can aid design: simulation, drawings, costing, modelling/designing, calculations from first principles etc. all without using special-purpose software.”

Computer Aided Design or CAD, is s specific field within computing. You cannot hand-wave to make it go away because there’s no decent FOSS software in it.

mrpogson.com/2012/08/30/pc-oems-in-revolt-against-m/#comment-94989

“There are many organizations that despise that other OS but see Munich as proof of their fears that it will be too costly/difficult to switch.”

Where the fork is Largo? And why should I care about it??

Malta? The 200th smallest country on the planet, with a population less than half that of Manitoba?

You’re really bringing out the big guns, aren’t you?

There are lots of ways computers can aid design: simulation, drawings, costing, modelling/designing, calculations from first principles etc. all without using special-purpose software. I have done a lot of CAD in my time because I actually made stuff you could not buy off the shelf. Could I have used a CAD package? No. I needed stuff done immediately not next year when budget approval/acquisition/learning happened. I designed things like the beam buncher at the U of Manitoba cyclotron and the dee-tips, the nuclear spin filter and the magnetic field analyzer, all stuff that was critical to a multi-million dollar installation and it took the time, energy and knowhow that no CAD developer is likely to know anything about like the time-dependent perturbation theory of atomic energy levels and space-charge effects in ion-beams.

Government is Munich, Largo, Malta, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, France, Italy, India, China, etc. too. They run GNU/Linux widely. You’re the one with the narrow view.

“one can do CAD and accounting perfectly well without a software package for the purpose.”

COMPUTER Aided Design without software to do it?? I’d really, really like to see that. And a suitable FOSS equivalent to AutoCAD or VectorWorks? Name one.

You could I suppose, do accounting with a pen and paper, calculator or even an abacus. But in these days of computers to do the grunt work for you, what sane person would want to?

I have never used a CAD package or and accounting package in teaching and I have only seen that done in two instances by other teachers. Those are specialties and the bulk of education is aimed at producing general students. Students can choose to attend schools where such courses are taught but there’s nothing in the curriculum requiring those courses to be taught in every school.

Further, one can do CAD and accounting perfectly well without a software package for the purpose. Even so GNU/Linux has a lot of packages suitable.

It is if there’s no suitable alternative.

I don’t see a FOSS CAD package worth a damn, or serious accounting software.

An office suite and browser is not the be-all and end-all of software requirements.

It will be interesting to see if that slowed down. If so it will prove once and for all that Windows is infected due to poor design.