cadwork is a computer aided design software, created in 1980 by the CSEM, and followed in 1982 by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.The school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:...

 (EPFL), before it came a Swiss society in 1988 (Cadwork informatik).

In the origin, cadwork was developed for the watch

Watch

A watch is a small timepiece, typically worn either on the wrist or attached on a chain and carried in a pocket, with wristwatches being the most common type of watch used today. They evolved in the 17th century from spring powered clocks, which appeared in the 15th century. The first watches were...

 industry, but it is now mainly used by the building and construction market:

• Civil Engineering
  Civil engineering
  Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including works like roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings...
  
  
• Carpentry
  Carpentry
  A carpenter is a skilled craftsperson who works with timber to construct, install and maintain buildings, furniture, and other objects. The work, known as carpentry, may involve manual labor and work outdoors....
  
  
• Topographic
• Road
  Road
  A road is a thoroughfare, route, or way on land between two places, which typically has been paved or otherwise improved to allow travel by some conveyance, including a horse, cart, or motor vehicle. Roads consist of one, or sometimes two, roadways each with one or more lanes and also any...
  
   building (EasyRoad)
  Easyroad Cadwork
  EasyRoad, is a computer aided design software, developed for road designers, created in 2004 by Cadwork Corp in Switzerland.This software is to be considered as an add-on to AutoCAD and works on Microsoft Windows NT...
  
  
• Architecture
  Architecture
  Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
  
  
• Armed concrete
• Glue laminated timber
• Stairs
  Stairs
  -People:* Scott Kannberg , guitarist of Pavement* A. Edison Stairs , New Brunswick politician* Denis Stairs , engineer, Montreal businessman* Ernest W. Stairs , New Brunswick politician...
  
  

The different modules in the suite allow to draw, to design (CAD) or to manufacture (CAM

Cam

A cam is a rotating or sliding piece in a mechanical linkage used especially in transforming rotary motion into linear motion or vice-versa. It is often a part of a rotating wheel or shaft that strikes a lever at one or more points on its circular path...

).

cadwork files have the following extensions :

• .2d, .2dc (2 dimensions drawing)
• .3d, .3dc (3 dimensions design)
• .2dr (road projects)
• .2dv (parametric elements).

These files can be viewed with the free software. The free version allows to Zoom

Zoom

Zoom is an onomatopoeiac sound that indicates swiftness.Zoom may also refer to:-Technology:* Zoom lens, a lens assembly allowing for adjustable focal length* Digital zoom, an electronic emulation of focal length change...

, to PAN and to print, but it doesn't allow to modify the drawings.

Technical characteristics

• Between 1982 and 1996, cadwork was compiled only on workstations, such as those from Apollo Computer
  Apollo Computer
  Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s...
  
  , Digital Equipment Corporation
  Digital Equipment Corporation
  Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
  
   (VAX
  VAX
  VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
  
   and Alpha
  DEC Alpha
  Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...
  
   platforms) and Hewlett-Packard. The program was written in Fortran
  Fortran
  Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
  
   and compiled in 32 bits or 64 bits.
• In 1993, the core rewritten in C
  C (programming language)
  C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
  
  .
• Since 1996, release 7 worked also on Microsoft Windows NT 3.5.
• Since 2001, release 10 worked only on platform Microsoft Windows NT.
• Since 2006, the software was available in ten languages: French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Romanian, Polish and Finnish.
• Since 2007, a DWG Viewer and converter, based on OpenDWG, is freely available.