![\"wolly-mammoth.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/09\/wolly-mammoth-2.jpg\" "\\"wolly-mammoth.jpg\\"")
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Today I want to pay homage to two geniuses of the CAD world that no one has ever met before. In fact, we don\u2019t even know who they are. I call them Um and Ug. Um and Ug were hunters who lived before the time of high end graphics cards, before the time of television or radio, before the English language, before Stonehenge, and even before written language. Yes, the people responsible for modern CAD probably sat in a dimly lit room (or cave) and didn\u2019t talk much, much like today\u2019s CAD users. The thing that Um and Ug did that was revolutionary was that they developed the idea of abstraction.<\/P><\/p>\n
You see, Ug was out hunting yesterday and he saw a big mastodon. But he couldn\u2019t kill it himself. Um was just sitting there doing nothing. Ug wanted Um to help him kill the mastodon so they could have a big party, but the only way he had to communicate was to jump up and down, wave his arms, and make crazy sounds.<\/P><\/p>\n
But then Ug got this crazy idea. He kind of chuckled to himself a little, but thought \u201cwhat do I have to lose?\u201d So he stuck out one finger and started dragging it through the sand. He ran out of room, cuz, you know, a mastodon is huge, and it was just a starter cave, but he did the best he could to make a shape in the sand that represented the mastodon. It might not seem like it to you today, but for Ug on that dreary day in the cramped cave, going from the mental image in his head as he remembered the mastodon with excitement to the outline in the sand that represented the mastodon was a huge leap.<\/P><\/p>\n
Um wasn\u2019t impressed. He just didn\u2019t see it.<\/P><\/p>\n
Then Ug added the tusks, and he could see the wheels working in Um\u2019s brain. There\u2019s a link between this path in the sand and that animal. But more importantly, there\u2019s a link between an idea in Ug\u2019s brain and an idea in Um\u2019s brain. This was the first breakthrough in CAD. It\u2019s a technique called abstraction, where you use a simple idea to represent a more complex idea.<\/P><\/p>\n
Today I want to pay homage to two geniuses of the CAD world that no one has ever met before. In fact, we don\u2019t even know who they are. I call them Um and Ug. Um and Ug were hunters who lived before t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61781,"featured_media":9953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/09\/visualization-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9945"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9954,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9945\/revisions\/9954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9945"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=9945"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=9945"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/solidedge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"visualization.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/09\/visualization-1.jpg\" "\\"visualization.jpg\\"")
<\/span>Lines in the sand, cave art, paintings, technical drawings, photography, television, movies, computers \u2013 all methods of visualizing 3 dimensional objects on a 2D medium. These days we use abstractions all the time to help us understand more complex ideas, and sometimes it becomes difficult to know where the abstraction ends and reality begins. CAD and visualization tools create surreal imagery that helps us understand the inner workings of complex mechanical assemblies.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"