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The Unofficial History of ANSYS
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In 1963, Dr. John Swanson worked at Westinghouse Astronuclear
Labs in Pittsburgh, responsible for stress analysis of the
components in NERVA nuclear reactor rockets. He used computer
codes to model and predict transient stresses and displacements
of the reactor system due to thermal and pressure loads.
Swanson continued to develop 3-D analysis, plate bending,
nonlinear analysis for plasticity and creep, and transient
dynamic analysis, in the next several years, using a finite
element heat conduction program that was developed by Wilson
at Aerojet. Sawnson's program was called STASYS (Structural
Analysis SYStem).
Swanson believed an integrated, general-purpose FEA code could
be used to do complex calculations that engineers typically
did manually, such as heat transfer analysis. It would save
money and time for Westinghouse and other companies.
Westinghouse didn't support the idea, and Swanson left the
company in 1969 to establish Swanson Analysis Systems in his home
garage outside Pittsburgh. He developed his program using a
keypuncher and a time-shared mainframe at U.S. Steel. The first
version of ANSYS was coded by the end of 1970, and Westinghouse
was the first customer. According to Dr. Swanson, the name ANSYS
was because the copyright lawyers assured Swanson that ANSYS was
just a name, and did not stand for anything. Understandable, during
that period all programs were "written" on punch card. When
installing the program on the customer's computer, it meant carried
a relatively big case of punch cards to the customer's place, and
fed them into the machine.
It was said that the first people John every hired was a lady to
answer the phone. The author had also heard that one day John asked
this lady if she wanted to have lunch together. By common sense we
would all think that meant going out to eat. Sadly enough, John
opened the refrigerator and pulled out bread and stuff then began
to make sandwiches for both of them. This is, however, not verified
by Dr. Swanson himself yet.
In around 1970, users can ran ANSYS 2.x on a CDC 6600 machine over
the Cybernet timesharing network. That time only fixed format input
was available. The users would work up the input listing off-line,
key it onto a tape cassette, log on, submit the run about quitting
time for the best computer rates and stop by the CDC data center
next morning to find out what went wrong.
In 1975, MITS began to build and sell the first PC ever in human
history, the Altair. That, of course, did not have anything to do
with ANSYS yet. The so-called PC was just a few switches and lights
on the front board, and input had to be done in a binary fashion
(no keyboard and monitor, of course). What was worse, was that you
have to assemble it by yourself. And, it usually didn't work.
Although Altair was rather popular, nobody really knew what to do
with this machine. One former customer said that, the most popular
activity on Altair, was to figure out what to do with this machine.
At the At the same time, Microsoft built the BASIC language for Altair.
1977, Apple I was born.
In around 1979, Revision 3.0, ANSYS run on a VAX 11-780 minicomputer.
ANSYS evolved from fixed format input to purely command line driven
and monocolor (green) on a Tektronix 4010 or 4014 vector graphics
monitor. For a descent size model, the hidden lines plots could take
20-30 minutes. All of the nodes and elements were created separately
without the benefit of importing CAD geometry. NGEN, EGEN, RPnnn,
were used extensively. There was a geometry prepcessor, PREP7.
1980, we had Apple II.
In around 1980, John Swanson bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 machine, and
planned to build a commercial version on it. However, later John
returned the machine because Radio Shack left out (a socket for) a
floating point processor. John decided that Finite Element Analysis
probably should utilize a floating point processor, so he got his
money back for that one.
Also around 1980,Rev 4 on an VAX 11-780 system was great, according
to some old users. The chasm between batch and interactive running
pretty much disappeared and file management was a very easy thing.
No more element hard coding, the post processing got hugely better
and you could mix batch and interactive running as you saw fit. Big
dynamic transient runs or substructuring over night, post-processing
and plotting next morning. Emag capabilities were first introduced at
Rev 4.1.
Also in 1980, Microsoft signed contract with IBM to provide the OS,
PC DOS, for its up coming PC. This OS, however, was not created by
Microsoft. Microsoft bought it rom an engineer for 50K USD, which was
named the QDOS - the Quick and Dirty Operation System.
1981, IBM PC was born. This computer was created using the off the
shelf technology, and an open architecture. The original reasons were
to push the product to the market ASAP, so that IBM could catch up
with the PC market. However, the BIOS was proprietary. Later Compaq
reverse-engineer the BIOS and created a fully IBM PC compatible BOIS.
This ignited the PC cloning market and war. The booming of PC market
directly changed the meaning of computing. PC price dropped 30% at
one month. And, it was the booming of cloned IBM PC that really brought
money into Microsoft.
1984, the revolutionary Macintonsh was born. Macintosh was far advanced
then the IBM PC family at that time. The concept of GUI in the OS level
and WYSIWYG was not possible on IBM PC until almost one decade later.
However, the market of Macintosh did not pick up very soon, which
caused the Steve Job's leave from Apple computer.
However, later the sales of Macintonsh began to take off, which proved
that Steve Job's vision had all been right. Macintosh saved Apple, and
was directly responsible for the phenomena of Apple craze and fans.
A PC version of ANSYS was also available at around version 4.0 too in
about 1984. It was running on a Intel 286, with interactive command
line input and limited graphics on the screens, like elements and
nodes. No Motif GUI yet. In the first release on ANSYS on PC's,
preprocessing, solution and post processing were performed in separate
programs.
"Design Optimization" was introduced at Rev 4.2 (1985). This is also
the release at which "Macro length is no longer limited to 400
characters."
FLOTRAN started as a graduate (PhD) project by Rita J. Schnipke in
the University of Virginia circa 1986. After grad school Rita started
(or helped start) Compuflo which was later sold to ANSYS in 1992. Rita
later started her own shop which is in Charlottesville VA called Blue
Ridge Numerics. They make CFDesign, a finite element based CFD code
(www.cfdesign.com).
1988 at an ANSYS conference in California, IBM was there pushing
their first unix machine, the "RT". It was slow. They asked Dr. Swanson
if he would make a comment on it. He said "RT must stand for Real Turkey.
SASI first started working with Compuflo (FLOTRAN) in 1989. At ANSYS
Rev 5.0 and FLOTRAN V2.1A, SASI had what they called a "seamless
interface"
between the two programs (1993). FLOTRAN was "fully integrated" into
ANSYS at Rev 5.1 (1994).
In 1993, Version 5.0 was released. And the version 5.1 later has a
Motif GUI, which would remained the similar layout up to 6.0.
Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc., was sold to TA Associates in 1994.
The new company name, ANSYS, Inc., was announced at AUTOFACT '94 in
Detroit.
1995, Windows 95 was published. Windows 95 was an important milestone
for Microsoft. It bridged between the old DOS OS into the new NT
technology. The birth of Windows 95 finally made it more and more
acceptable for engineering community to use PC as a heavy duty
calculation machine like workstations.
In 1996, ANSYS 5.3 was published, with support for LS-DYNA. The
feature of ANSYS/LS-DYNA in ANSYS 5.3 was still in the beginning
stage.
On June 20, 1996, ANSYS Inc. common stock began trading on Nasdaq
under ANSS after being 26 years a privately held company. The IPO
generated more than $41 million.
1998, ANSYS began to ship ANSYS/ed to university labs and paper
reviewers. One of the copy arrived at the Structures Lab of Civil
Engineering Department in Arizona State University, and that was the
first time the author knew about ANSYS.
January 2001, ANSYS announced the release of CADfix (International
TechneGroup Incorporated) for ANSYS version 5.6.2 and 5.7. CADfix
was to address the issue of importing CAD model into ANSYS with
automatic geometric data repair.
November 2001, ANSYS acquired CADOE S.A, an independent software
vendor that specializes in the CAD/CAE market. In the same month,
ANSYS announced a strategic OEM partnership with SAS LLC, a provider
of NASTRAN simulation software and services. The alliance was focused
on the joint development of a new NASTRAN computer-aided engineering
solution that will be distributed exclusively by ANSYS Inc.
November 2001, ANSYS announced AI*Environment. AI*Environment
combines ICEM CFD Engineering's pre- and post-processor technologies.
December 2001, ANSYS 6.0 was released. In this version, the Sparse
solver was greatly improved. Efficient and reliable large scale model
analysis (say, 1M DOF) finally became practical. The graphics screen
of ANSYS was also painted blue in 6.0, which came out to be a great
disappointment to a lot of users.
In April of 2002, ANSYS 6.1 was released. The familiar Motif GUI was
replaced by a Tcl/tk developed interface. It runs on 64-bit Intel
Itanium architecture with Windows XP.
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From The Author
===================
I began to collected and wrote this article in the early 2002. One of
the reasons was that I signed a contract with a publisher in Taiwan,
to write a book about using ANSYS for industrial product reliability
analysis. I felt that it was necessary to have a chapter totally
contribute to the history of ANSYS. And, the most important, it will
be very interesting.
The author wants to thank the help from many engineers and scientists
in the xansys internet group. Some of the former employees of ANSYS
also contribute greatly to this article, and many of them prefer not
to be named. I also received emails from differetn people, and I
usually tried to verify before I used them. Although I am trying to
keep all the statement as accurate as possible, I really can not
guarantee the correctness of any information in this article.
Many of us, including the author in the xansys group especially want
to thank Dr. John Swanson, who invented ANSYS, and changes the life
of many engineers forever in certain ways.
Anyone is welcome to distribute this article anyway he or she wants,
as long as the original article remains unchanged (including "From
The Author"). Comments and suggestion should be forwarded to the
authors directly. I will be glad to update this file continuously.
This article will be always on the web site www.FEA-Optimization.com,
util I finally can not afford to pay the registration fee. To avoid
spam, I am not going to put my email address here. You should be able
to contact me, or find the way to contact me through the web site.
Shen-Yeh Chen, Ph.D.
June 18, 2002
www.FEA-Optimization.com
作者: LaLa 时间: 2011-5-1 09:29
Westinghouse didn't support the idea, and Swanson left the
company in 1969 to establish Swanson Analysis Systems in his home
garage outside Pittsburgh. He developed his program using a
keypuncher and a time-shared mainframe at U.S. Steel. The first
version of ANSYS was coded by the end of 1970, and Westinghouse
was the first customer.
