==The Unofficial History of ANSYS==
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 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.

The author of above whole history is Shen-Yeh Chen Ph.D. and the this is the version written as on June 18, 2002. The link provided by him along with this history is www.FEA-Optimization.com.