It was co-founded in 1969 in Bedford, Massachusetts by four founders working at the MIT Lincoln Lab:[1][2] Fontaine Richardson who earned a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois in 1968,[3] Gary Hornbuckle who had received a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley,[4] and Richard N. Spann and Harry Lee who received degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Applicon was acquired by Schlumberger in 1980, at which point Richardson and Hornbuckle left the company.
In 1986 Schlumberger management combined its Applicon division with another entity which it had acquired, Manufacturing Data Systems, Inc. (MDSI), to create the Schlumberger CAD/CAM division, siting its main office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This was an irritant because of the large number of poorly documented User Defined (community contributed) commands contained in the software package.
A user suspecting they'd drawn wrong would invariably continue to randomly scribble in order to avoid any possible matches.
At this time, only large companies could afford to use CAD machines and they had to man the workstations three shifts a day because of the cost.
In the mid to late 1970s, Applicon systems were used to design LSIs (large scale integrated circuits) and later VLSI (very large scale integrated circuits), the precursors of today's dense computer chips.
The end of Applicon came in 1989 when it partnered with PTC and sold a product called Mechanical Design Assistant[citation needed].