M Intergraph Systems

[Orville Marquez]

Theterminals used microprocessors to control the display of the graphics image locally but still relied on the VAX processor to manage the Intergraph application products that created and manipulated the graphics database. Their first standalone workstation, the InterPro 32 was introduced in 1984.[1]

In the 1990s, Intergraph built their products around the PC, powered with Intel processors. Intergraph claimed that after several years of mutually beneficial work, in 1996 Intel began making unreasonable demands for royalty-free rights to Intergraph patents already being used in Intel microprocessors. When Intergraph refused, Intel abused its monopoly power by engaging in a series of illegal coercive actions intended to force Intergraph to give Intel access to the patents.

In 1998, Dassault acquired the French Matra Datavision company, creators of the EUCLID systems for free-form surface modeling, NC control and injection molding simulation. The EUCLID Styler, Machinist, Strim and Strimflow products enhanced the CATIA product in these areas. They later partnered with IBM as a strategic international business partner.

Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: A Retrospective Overview Copyright 2017 by Wayne E. Carlson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Intergraph Corporation was an American software development and services company, which now forms part of Hexagon AB. It provides enterprise engineering and geospatially powered software to businesses, governments, and organizations around the world, and operates through three divisions: Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI, formerly PPM), Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure, and Hexagon Geospatial. The company's headquarters is in Huntsville, Alabama, United States.[2]

Intergraph was founded in 1969 as M&S Computing, Inc., by former IBM engineers JimMeadlock, his wife Nancy, Terry Schansman (the S of M&S), Keith Schonrock, andRobert Thurber who had been working with NASA and the U.S. Army in developing systems that would apply digital computing to real time missile guidance. The company was later renamed to Intergraph Corporation in 1980.[4]

One of Intergraph's major hardware projects was developing a line of workstations using the Clipper architecture created by Fairchild Semiconductor. Intergraph was one of only two companies to use the chips in a major product line. Intergraph developed their own version of UNIX for the architecture, which they called CLIX. In 1987, Intergraph bought the Fairchild division responsible for the chip.

In 1997, Intergraph began pursuing patent infringement litigation against Intel and other computer hardware manufacturers based on the intellectual property developed in Clipper. Intergraph negotiated major settlements with Intel,[5] HP,[6] Texas Instruments[7] and Gateway,[8] earning the company over $394M. In 2000, Intergraph exited the hardware business and became purely a software company. On July 21, 2000, it sold its Intense3D graphics accelerator division to 3Dlabs, and its workstation and server division to Silicon Graphics.[9]

On November 29, 2006, Intergraph was acquired by an investor group led by Hellman & Friedman LLC, Texas Pacific Group and JMI Equity, making the company privately held. On October 28, 2010, Intergraph was acquired by Hexagon AB.[10] The transaction marks the return of Intergraph as part of a publicly traded company.

As part of the Hexagon acquisition, Hexagon moved the management of ERDAS, Inc. from under Leica Geosystems to Intergraph, and Z/I Imaging airborne imaging sensors from under Intergraph to Leica Geosystems.[11]

On December 2, 2013, the geospatial technology portfolio was split out from under the Intergraph Security, Government and Infrastructure division to form the Hexagon Geospatial division.[12] On October 13, 2015, the Intergraph Security, Government & Infrastructure division was rebranded as Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure.[13] On January 9, 2017, the Intergraph Government Solutions division was rebranded as Hexagon US Federal.[14]

An important early project was the development of an interactive graphics system for the design and layout of printed circuit boards. This NASA effort fundamentally launched the company into the computer graphics business. Later, the software was expanded to cover the design of integrated circuits. According to Meadlock, being able to perform computer graphics independent of a programmer was a novel concept at the time.[1] The initial minicomputer version of this software was implemented on Xerox (formerly Scientific Data Systems) Sigma 5 and Sigma 2 computers.[2]

Like many other engineering entrepreneurs Meadlock did not have much use for traditional sales and marketing. His attitude was if you built a good product the customers would come. In the late 1970s, the company had just a handful of sales people and promotional literature consisted mainly of black and white product data sheets. The primary sales technique was to bring the prospect to Huntsville where Meadlock would lay on his considerable charm.

Meadlock received numerous awards during his career including being one of 15 individuals to receive a 1985 Congressional High Technology Award. He was also given an Ed Forrest award for contributions to the CAD industry at the 1994 A/E/C SYSTEMS Conference in Washington, D.C.

In the early 1970s, Intergraph was still basically a consulting company. The market for turnkey graphics systems was taking off very slowly, mostly for the design of printed circuit boards and integrated circuits. There was one consistency in this technology and that was the concept of data layers. Designs consisted of two-dimensional representations of data elements and these layers were stacked one on top of another.

A $300,000 budget was established in 1973 to procure a system for digitizing and managing geospatial data. Orr set out to see what other cities such as Houston, Atlanta and Eugene, Oregon were doing to establish digital map databases. Based on his findings a Request For Proposal was prepared and distributed to potential bidders. Nashville received 40 responses including proposals from Synercom and Calma which were both more established in this market than was Intergraph.

The company was well respected for the human factors aspects of its system design. The software was strong in mapping, drafting and database management. Although they had some manufacturing companies as customers, mechanical design and drafting was not a targeted market at this time.

The third approach was to create two parallel universes, one for graphics and one for related attribute information. This is fundamentally what Intergraph did and it worked very well for over a decade. The graphic system was the previously mentioned IGDS software which by 1980 was in its eighth incarnation. The data management function was handled by a new program, DMRS (Database Management and Retrieval System). It was a hierarchical database management system which was the preferred technology at the time. It would be a few more years before relational database technology was considered ready for prime time.

Multiwire was a technique where a machine laid overlapping insulated wires on a circuit board instead of etching traces as was done with traditional printed circuit boards. Corrections could be made to Multiwire boards with a soldering gun and jumper wires more easily than PCBs could be modified. Intergraph itself was a major user of this technology having installed $5 million of specialized equipment in 1980 and 1981 for producing Multiwire boards. While Intergraph purchased computer equipment from Digital, it produced custom circuit boards for its dual-screen workstations, the disk scanner and a vector to raster converter for driving electrostatic plotters.[6] In fact, Intergraph was beginning to become a fairly significant electronics manufacturing company at this point.

Intergraph also began the serious development of mechanical design software in the 1981 time frame. At AUTOFACT 4 held in November 1982 in Philadelphia, Intergraph demonstrated new mechanical design and manufacturing software including 5axis machining. A new 64-bit graphics processor enabled the software to do hidden line removal operations, perform image rotation and produce shaded images very quickly.

At the same conference Intergraph introduce a low-cost VAX 11-730 system that sold for $145,000 with one workstation and mechanical design and drafting software. The company also previewed a new InterAct workstation powered by a Motorola 68000 microprocessor.[7]

There were two versions of this new InterAct workstation. The DSP041 used two monochromatic raster displays while the DSP042 had one monochromatic display and one 256-color display. The 68000-based display processor with its 68KB memory handled functions such as pan, zoom and rotate locally once the graphic image was transferred from the VAX memory. View transformations of fairly complex images typically took less than two seconds. The company was also working on an array processor than would be able to produce images of complex three-dimensional models with hidden lines removed ten to twenty times faster than could be done in software on a VAX 11/780.

Bechtel was seeing significant productivity improvements using these systems. Pipe hanger design went from four hours to 15 minutes while, at least in one case, a 30hour structural frame design was done in 30 minutes. Much of this performance was accomplished through the use of specialized IGDS add-ons developed by Bechtel. One example was BISEPS (Bechtel Interactive System for Engineering of Pipe Supports).[8]

Another pressing need for mapping software in the early 1980s was in the oil and gas industry for managing exploration and production data. Just a few years earlier, the United States had experienced a severe oil shortage that resulted in long lines at the local gas station. Intergraph recognized the need for new technology to help in this area and plunged in to provide solutions to the industry. It turned out that many of the application modules developed to support energy companies were also useful for other mapping customers. These packages included software to:

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