Patrick J. Hanratty

Patrick J. Hanratty was an American computer scientist and businessperson, commonly referred to as the "Father of CAD/CAM"[1][2][3]—computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing.

[1][2] According to MCS, "70 percent of all 3-D mechanical CAD/CAM systems available today trace their roots back to Hanratty’s original code,"[1][4][5] although that statistic is not substantiated elsewhere.

[1] He worked for General Electric, where in 1957 he wrote Pronto, an early commercial numerical control (NC) programming language.

[6] Around the mid-1950s Hanratty and a team from the Stanford Research Institute using equipment built by the General Electric Computer Laboratory developed standardized machine-readable characters for use on bank checks.

[3][7] In 1970 he cofounded the company Integrated Computer Systems (ICS) with seven of his coworkers from Astronautics Corporation, which had been acquired by McDonnell Douglas.