René Descartes of course, but the game changer was Douglas Ross, creator of APT at MIT in the 50's- the 'preamble' to all CAD/CAM that followed

I found this on Goggle... lol Who invented CAD CAM technology? engineer Pierre Bézier The invention of the 3D CAD/CAM is attributed to French engineer Pierre Bézier (Arts et Métiers ParisTech, Renault). Between 1966 and 1968, after his mathematical work concerning surfaces, he developed UNISURF to ease the design of parts and tools for the automotive industry.

Powermill may not be around for much longer. AD is doing to PM what they did to Partmaker and other software programs they purchased. Just keep your eyes open. Here at DN Solutions, I had my choice of whatever software I wanted. I chose Mastercam simply because I had a LOT of time invested in it. Like since V6. Then, I also got Powermill. In addition to MX. The 5 axis stuff was awesome. Blows MX away in some areas. But, no real geometry creation inside of Powermill. You had to export to Powershape, create what you needed, then reimport back to Powermill. After about a year, I had enough. I quit using it. Lazy? Maybe. But I had work to get done and felt that I did not have the time or inclination to pursue Powermill since my contact at AD did not believe they were putting any more than was absolutely needed into the software. Is Mastercam perfect? No, but I could do everything I needed within the single piece of software.

Programming with NCL on an SGI was the best, absolutely loved it.

Yep, I learned programming on an APT system. Unbounded geometry, you just can't beat it. 3 plane lock, for a long time (if not still) this was the most accurate way to machine a surface. If I had my druthers, I would run NCL. But I would never advise anybody to install it in their shop. NOT user friendly and good NCL programmers command very high salaries and are as rare as rocking horse manure. As Pete says, all the so called "multiaxis kernels" are simply a GUI interpretation of the original APT vector matrix.

This gives a deeper history of the CAD side. https://www.cadazz.com/cad-software-history.htm

Yes, there are computer science, math majors, and guys who just started on machines and understood what needed to be done and figured it out behind all of this stuff. All of the CAM software has their wonks behind the scenes doing that. If you want to meet the people behind the curtain you need to be pretty specific about which toolpath you want to know about. For example, there's a different guy behind Mastercam's Dynamic than, say, Equal Scallop. And each toolpath is really a team effort anyway. ModuleWorks in particular was started by Yavuz Murtezaoglu, and he's the guy who wrote the original 5 axis engine for it which does all the surface-based stuff (morph between 2 curves/surfaces, parallel to curves/surfaces, etc.). He's not the guy who actually coded the newer geodesic engine stuff (in Mastercam's Unified toolpath as guides, automatic mode, or Morph/Parallel set to "exact" mode). He's also not the lady behind the Swarf Milling. They now have a lot of programmers! Depending on how far down you want to go, the guys who apply this stuff to make toolpaths are often standing on the shoulders of giants in the fields of Mathmatics. Many toolpath ideas are taken from mathmatics and physics white papers. For example, Yavuz cites Dr. Bronshtein's Handbook of Mathmatics as a fundamental basis for his original toolpaths.