PTC was founded in 1985, by Samuel Peisakhovich Geisberg, who previously worked at Prime Computer, Computervision (CV) and Applicon. Pro/ENGINEER (a.k.a. Pro/E), the company’s first product, shipped in 1988.

John Deere became PTC’s first customer.
Once an initial version of Pro/ENGINEER was developed, the company received venture capital funding from Charles River Associates and Steve Walske became the CEO. Pro/ENGINEER was the first commercially successful parametric feature based solid modeler. Through a combination of innovative technology, and no-holds-barred sales tactics, PTC quickly became a major force in the CAD industry. Its strong ascent continued unabated until the mid-1990s, when the introduction of Microsoft Windows NT, and the availability of commercial geometric modeling libraries opened the door to a new generation of low-cost competitors and PTC’s reputation for overly aggressive sales tactics alienated many of its customers.

These competitors, symbolized by Solidworks, squeezed PTC from the bottom, while more established companies like Unigraphics and IBM held the ‘high ground’ in automotive and aerospace industries. PTC’s sales began a multi-year decline from which it took years to recover. It took a new CAD product (Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire) and an expanded product line, but PTC has been able to transform itself over the past 10 years into the third largest provider of Product Lifecycle Management software .

On December 29, 2006 Standard & Poor’s bumped PTC off its S&P 500 Index, and replaced it instead with the newly spun-off natural gas company Spectra Energy Corp. (NYSE: SE). Parametric then bumped Pier 1 Imports Inc. (NYSE: PIR), a retailer of home furnishings, down one spot and off the bottom of the S&P MidCap 400 IndexIn 2008, PTC once again achieved revenues of over $1 billion something it had not been able to accomplish since 1999.

Since 1985, PTC has been 100% committed to supporting the needs of leading manufacturing companies worldwide. As one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing technology companies, PTC delivers technology solutions that transform the way companies create and service their products.

But even if you’re a regular user of PTC Creo and other PTC products, you may not be very familiar with our rich company history. That’s why today I’d like to offer you a quick history of PTC and PTC Creo. I obviously can’t write about every little thing the company has ever done. So instead, I’ll highlight some key events over the years that shed light on the evolution of this company and the PTC Creo family of CAD software solutions.

PTC first launched Pro/ENGINEER – the software that would one day become PTC Creo – back in 1988. With Pro/ENGINEER, PTC was the first to market with parametric, associative feature-based, solid modeling software. During that same year, legendary heavy equipment manufacturer John Deere became PTC’s first customer.

A few years later, in 1992, construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar became PTC’s biggest customer. During that same year Industry Week named Pro/ENGINEER Technology of the Year.

Fast-forward to 1998 and PTC Windchill is first launched. PTC was the first to market with Internet-based solutions for Product Lifecycle Management. During the following year, PTC surpassed 25,000 customers for the first time.

PTC has been acquiring and partnering with the right companies and expanding the breadth of its solutions ever since, most recently adding capabilities almost unimaginable in 1985–like real-time simulation and generative design. Here’s a brief timeline:

1998 – Company ships Windchill and is considered first to market with internet-based solutions for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). PTC acquires Computervision Corp.
2005 – Acquired Arbortext for technical publishing technology.
2006 – Acquired Mathsoft for its engineering calculation software. Acquired ITEDO for its 3D technical illustration software.
2007 – Acquired CoCreate for its direct modeling technology.
2013 – Acquired ThingWorx, the Exton, Pennsylvania-based creators of an platform for building and running applications for the Internet of Things (IoT).
2015 – Acquired the Vuforia business from Qualcomm Connected Experiences, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. The Vuforia platform is an augmented reality (AR) technology platform.
2018 – Acquired Frustrum for its generative design technology.
When Did Pro/Engineer Become Creo?
With the acquisition of Co-Create in 2007, PTC knew that it has a particularly powerful technology in its arsenal. That was the power of direct modeling. The company set out to integrate the direct modeling technology with the parametric functionality of Pro/ENGINEER. After accomplishing this successfully, the company decided to rebrand the product like to reflect the fact PTC could now enable both direct and parametric modeling. The new solution set, PTC Creo, was first introduced in 2010.

A CAD Renaissance
PTC Creo 6.0 made its debut in March of 2019, boasting many new features and capabilities. Today’s 3D CAD includes tools for augmented reality, additive manufacturing, etc.

A key characteristic of Pro/ENGINEER was that as the model was created, the software recorded each step the operator took. This was referred to as a “history tree.” The software also recoded geometric aspects of the model such as whether two surfaces were parallel or the fact that a hole was a specified distance from the edge of the part. Each dimension used to define the part was also recorded. If the user placed a through hole in a block and the thickness of the block was later increased, the length of the hole would increase proportionately. With older solid modelers, the user would have been left with the hole ending inside the block.

One aspect of Pro/ENGINEER that was an early strength but would later be a problem was the fact that the model was always fully constrained. That meant that there were no redundant constraints nor could the model lack any information that fully defined its geometry. If a critical dimension or constraint was missing, the software would alert the user of this fact and would not proceed until the necessary information was provided.

If the user decided to change a dimension, the software would use the saved history tree to regenerate the model. For small models, this was nearly instantaneous but as models became larger, the time increased significantly. These changes were incorporated into the history tree so that as more and more changes were made, the regeneration time would increase. As an example, if a hole was initially placed in the model and later removed, each time the model was regenerated the software would insert the hole and then remove it. Users got around this problem by placing portions of the model on separate layers and only regenerating the layers they were currently working with.

Part designs were stored in separate files. Designers could then combine these parts, some custom and some standard, in an assembly. Rather than creating copies of the individual parts in the assembly model, Pro/ENGINEER referred back to these individual part files. If a part was subsequently changed, the new version could propagate throughout the assemblies that used it.

The fact that constraints and dimensions could propagate between parts in an assembly was particularly impressive at the time. If one part had a projection that fit into a slot on another part and the size and shape of the projection changed, the slot would also change when the assembly was regenerated. Although not obvious at the start, another powerful aspect of PTC’s software was that all applications worked off the same database. Within the Pro/ENGINEER suite of software, there was no need to translate model data from one format to another when the user switched applications.

The common data structure enabled PTC to incorporate bi-directional associativity between software modules. A change to the solid model resulted in changes to relevant drawings, analysis models and machine tool paths while a change to a drawing could change the model from which that drawing was derived. Users could decide whether this associativity was to be activated or not.

The weakest aspect of Pro/ENGINEER when it was launched probably was its inability to create engineering drawings without first building a model of the part or assembly. Many projects required simple twodimensional drawings. Users ended up acquiring simpler packages such as AutoCAD for these tasks or to add details to Pro/ENGINEER drawings that PTC’s software was incapable of handling.
Early versions of Pro/ENGINEER were particularly amenable to the design of families of parts where the general shape of the part did not change, just one or more key dimensions.