Patrick J. Hanratty

Early career

Hanratty worked for General Electric, where in 1957 he wrote Pronto, an early commercial numerical control (NC) programming language. Then he moved in 1961 to General Motors Research Laboratories, where his projects focused on NC software and taking complex surfaces and producing toolpath data for NC machines.

Banking standard Around the mid-1950s Hanratty and a team from the Stanford Research Institute using equipment built by the General Electric Computer Laboratory developed standardized machine-readable characters for use on bank checks. Adopted by the American Bankers Association in 1958, their characters are still in use and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) and the E-13B font became standard in the industry.

Business In 1970 he cofounded the company Integrated Computer Systems (ICS) with seven of his coworkers from Astronautics Corporation, which had been acquired by McDonnell Douglas. ICS failed because its product, a CAD/CAM drafting system, was tied to a computer that few people had available, and because its product was written in TPL, an unfamiliar language for most people.

In 1971 Hanratty founded Manufacturing and Consulting Services (MCS), applying what he had learned at ICS. All the software was written in Fortran and it ran on almost any computer. His product was named Automated Drafting and Machining (ADAM), later AD-2000, and still later Anvil-4000.

Among well-known customers of MCS were Computervision who licensed Adam for CADDS, Gerber Scientific for IDS 3, and McDonnell Douglas who licensed it for Unigraphics. Several well-known CAD/CAM packages were developed from MCS products. Among them were Auto-Grapl, Autosnap 3D, Anvil-5000, and Intelligent Modeler.