Computervision was founded in 1969 by Marty Allen and Philippe Villers, and headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States.

Integrated circuit layout was added with the CADDS-2 product, which had a dedicated operating system and a 16-bit graphic database.

CADDS3 was introduced in the late 1970s on the CGP80 and CGP100 using Tektronix storage tube vector devices as display terminals and graphics tablets with menus for operator input.

In 1984 a cluster of CGP200X with a proprietary 32-bit processor Analytic Processing Unit (APU) was offered as the Computervision Distributed System (CDS) 4000.

[5][6] In 1983 Computervision purchased Cambridge Interactive Systems (CIS), founded by British computer scientist Dr. Dick Newell and Tom Sancha.

Computervision was interested in obtaining some of the state-of-the-art technology of the MEDUSA CAD system the Cambridge company had developed.

With falling hardware sales Prime eventually stopped production of PRIMOS computers and transferred its maintenance obligations to another company, thus being able to concentrate on the CAD/CAM software business.

This system never ran any graphics software but instead was used to manage the large number of product files and data that users were generating.

Ultimately in 1987, CV migrated from the CGP systems to Sun-3-based workstations known as CADDStations with a VME bus version of the GPU.

Computervision merged with Prime Computer in 1988 and acquired GE Calma (its major competitor in the microelectronic CAD market) in 1989.

Mervyn Richards, responsible for this initiative later became one of the industries leading experts in Computer Aided Design, Modeling and construction IT (see the BS1192 specification).

[11] The first higher educational user of Computervision equipment was State University of New York College of Technology at Alfred, New York which acquired a CADDS3 system in 1979 with the help of a NSF grant and generous donation of equipment by Computervision employees Virgil Ross, Drew Davis and Bob Gothie.

The first graduating class of 18 students had over 75 job offers, launching a 20-year history of unparalleled placement success.