PTC
More info
- Creator
- Samuel Geisberg
- Released
- 1985
- Type
- CAD and PLM software
- Website
- ptc.com
The company that made parametric 3D modelling the industry standard with Pro/ENGINEER.
Parametric Technology Corporation was founded in 1985 by Samuel Geisberg, and Pro/ENGINEER shipped in 1987. The idea was that a model is built from dimensioned, rule-driven features — change one dimension and the rest of the part recomputes. Obvious today, but the alternative was redrawing. Within a decade every competitor had copied the approach.
Pro/ENGINEER was renamed Creo in 2011 and the company shortened its own name to PTC. It then bought its way into adjacent territory: the ThingWorx IoT platform, the Vuforia AR toolkit from Qualcomm and, in 2019, browser-based Onshape, founded by SolidWorks veterans. Buying the competitor that runs in a browser is cheaper than rebuilding your own product for the cloud.