Last Update: June, 2009

About QCAD...

The History of QCAD

The Beginning

The project QCAD started in October 1999 as a fragment of CAM Expert, which is a CAM System for engraving and LASER cutting. CAM Expert was capable of enough CAD functionality that a spinoff for an independent CAD system made sense.

QCAD 1

QCAD 1 was an overwhelming success. Within about two years it had an estimated user base of about 70'000, probably more. Its user interface was available in 20 languages and it received top ratings and awards on several occasions.

However, while QCAD kept growing, it became clear that there would have to be a major redesign at one point to allow further extensions. That's why QCAD 2 development started in May 2002. The main goal of this ambitious project was to make QCAD more productive, more user friendly, more flexible and increase its compatibility with other products.

QCAD 2

QCAD 2 was first released in September 2003. It has been designed with modularity and future extensions in mind. Moreover a couple of interesting libraries and side products evolved out of the QCAD 2 development process: the QCAD libraries, dxflib and vec2web.

Thanks And Credits

QCAD is mainly the achievement of Andrew Mustun, software developer and founder of RibbonSoft GmbH. However, QCAD would not be where it is today without the help and contributions of many volunteers. The most active contributors are listed below.

Developers

Andrew Mustun - Main developer and project coordinator
Knute Lingaard - Performance tuning (especially for Mac OS X)
Juha Nieminen (Warp) - Author of fparser which evaluates mathematical expressions entered in QCAD.
Petri Damstén - Various improvements and bug-fixes.
Hanzy von Morgus - Port to Visual C++, VC++ project files.

Fonts

Japanese Fonts - Yoshimune Kobayashi
Font 'kochigothic_with_ties' for LASER cutting - Frans Grotepass

Internationalization

Bulgarian - Iskren Slavov, Atanas Trufev
Chinese - Tao Wei (韦涛)
Chinese Manual - Li Tao (李涛)
Czech - Lukáš Havlíček
Dutch - Bart ter Braak, Andrew Mustun
Estonian - Ain Vagula
French - Lalanne Laurent, Eric Le Carre
French Manual - Ronan Tison, Guillaume Audirac
German - Andrew Mustun
Greek - Yannis Giftomitros
Hungarian - Baranyai Laszlo, Ferenc Veres
Indonesian - Senora Mustun
Italian - Giuseppe Barnabei, Fabrizio Margini
Italian Manual - Lorenzo Vagnarelli
Lithuanian - Valdas Jankūnas
Polish - OpenOffice Polska, www.openoffice.com.pl
Portuguese BR - Eduardo Passeto
Portuguese Manual - Christiano Vasconcelos das Chagas
Punjabi - Amanpreet Singh Alam
Russian - Sam S. Ganzha, Ivan Novoselov
Slovak - Tomas Varga
Spanish - Mauricio R. Pérez, José Luis Gálvez
Spanish Manual - José Luis Gálvez
Turkish - Nilgün Belma Bugüner
Welsh - Kevin Donnelly

Part Library

A Galley
Alex Savvin
Andreas Zipf
Andrew Mustun
Armin Faltl
Bernard Schoenacker
Eivind Lund Vikebø
Frank Ramhold
Helmut Walle
Jerry Netzener
Kim Grossa
Peter Gavrik
Peter (pa3fbo)
Richard Bekking
Sam Gangha