Software Description

Computervision's first product, CADDS-1, was aimed at the printed circuit board layout and 2-D drafting markets. CADDS stood for Computervison Automated Design and Drafting System. The CADDS-1 system featured a combination digitizer and plotter mounted on a large drafting table. Integrated circuit layout was added with the CADDS-2 product, which had a dedicated operating system and a 16-bit graphic database. When this proved insufficient resolution for VLSI (very large scale integration), the company developed CADDS-2/VLSI in the late 1970s. CADDS-2/VLSI included a new operating system, a 32-bit database, and user expandability through a dedicated programming language called ICPL (integrated circuit programming language), which was a dialect of BASIC, based on an interpreter licensed from Fairchild Semiconductor. The original CADDS-2 ran on Data General Nova 1200 computers. CADDS-2/VLSI ran on Computervision's own hardware which were modified Data General Nova's and modified version of DG's operating systems.