IGES - History

History

The IGES project was started in 1979 by a group of CAD users and vendors, including Boeing, General Electric, Xerox, Computervision and Applicon, with the support of the National Bureau of Standards (now known as NIST) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The name was carefully chosen to avoid any suggestion of a database standard that would compete with the proprietary databases then used by the different CAD vendors.

Since 1988, the DoD has required that all digital product and manufacturing information (PMI) for weapons systems contracts (the engineering drawings, circuit diagrams, etc.) be delivered in electronic form such as IGES format. As a consequence, CAx software vendors who want to market their products to DoD subcontractors and their partners needed to support the import (reading) and export (writing) of IGES format files.

An ANSI standard since 1980, IGES has been used in the automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries. It has been used for weapons systems from Trident missile guidance systems to entire aircraft carriers. These part models may have to be used years after the vendor of the original design system has gone out of business. IGES files provide a way to access this data decades from now. Today, plugin viewers for Web browsers allow IGES files created 20 years ago to be viewed from anywhere in the world.

After the initial release of STEP (ISO 10303) in 1994, interest in further development of IGES declined, and Version 5.3 (1996) was the last published standard. A decade later, STEP has yet to fulfill its promise of replacing IGES, which remains the most widely used standard for CAx and PMI interoperability.