The AllyCAD History

THE BIRTH OF CECILE CAD (1985)

Cecile CAD, AllyCAD’s predecessor, was developed in 1985 by Paul Harper on HP 200 and HP 300 Series workstations. In those days you were very fortunate to have two diskette drives and only a select group of power users had a 10MB hard drive. Cecile CAD was named after Paul’s long-suffering wife who had spent many a night on her own during its gestation.

ALLYCAD GETS ITS NAME (1987)

Cecile CAD was renamed to AllyCAD as Allyson Lawless (Pty) Ltd was our biggest distributor in Southern Africa, at that stage our largest market. From the day of its launch, AllyCAD quickly became widely acclaimed for its ease-of-use and powerful functionality.

ALLYCAD REWRITTEN TO MAKE USE OF FASTER PROCESSORS (1987-91)

In 1987 the first of the IBM AT personal computers came onto the market with 640KB RAM and a 20MB hard drive at a fraction of the price of the HP workstations. AllyCAD was immediately rewritten to make use of the more powerful 386 and later 486 processors along with increased features and strength.

We still have users today that refuse to switch to the windows based version as AllyCAD 486 was indeed ahead of its time.

DOS BASED ALLYCAD REWRITTEN TO BE WINDOWS BASED (1994)

Following the emergence of Windows becoming the standard operating system, it was neccessary to rewrite AllyCAD once more to fully maximise its potential for this system. By 1995 it was evident that AllyCAD would emerge to be one of the fastest Windows CAD packages available, outperforming the speed of the competition, on redraws, snaps, and loading of drawings. The ground work was completed to propel AllyCAD to new heights.

KNOWLEDGE BASE AND CHOICE COMPUTING JOIN FORCES (1998)

Paul Harper (Choice Computing) and Knowledge Base joined forces to continue the development of AllyCAD.  The package had already become the premier draughting program in Southern Africa with over 3,000 users and a much larger user base internationally.

KNOWLEDGE BASE ACQUIRES SOLE RIGHTS FOR ALLYCAD (1998)

Knowledge Base bought the sole rights to continue developing AllyCAD and furthermore broke ties from its main distributor, Allyson Lawless, to allow an increased focus on quality customer support and service.

ALLYCAD SELECTED TO BECOME PART OF A GREATER RANGE OF  SOFTWARE (1999)

After extensive testing of industry leading CAD packages, AllyCAD was chosen to be the graphical engine for CIVIL DESIGNER. This Civil Engineering package that has lead the way for true integration of civil engineering software and is an unrivalled World-Class Platform for Civil Engineers.

CONSOLIDATION OF BRAND NAMES (2002)

AllyCAD was sold internationally under the name TrueCAD / ChoiceCAD. In October 2002, we consolidated all the brand names around the world and settled on AllyCAD.

ALLYCAD INTRODUCES ITS SOUGHT AFTER TOOLKITS (2003)

In 2003 we incorporated 5 industry specific Toolkits into AllyCAD. The toolkits allow you to complete many time consuming tasks in a matter of seconds and quickly became a popular addition in functionality with our clients.

ALLYCAD CONTINUES TO REACH NEW HEIGHTS (2005)

Under the Knowledge Base banner with ongoing development, AllyCAD has enjoyed loyal support from its expanding user base all over the world that now spans the civil, structural, electrical and mechanical engineering, architectural and manufacturing disciplines along with other design niches.

AllyCAD has been continually enhanced and modified to become a program widely acknowledged as being ahead of its time by offering an unrivalled combination of ease-of-use, functionality and performance.