NC Graphics

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NC Graphics was founded by Arthur Flutter in Waterbeach, Cambridge, England in 1977 after completing a PhD in Computer Aided Design at the CADCentre. This work became the basis of Toolmaker, a product that has been sold by the company since this time.

In the mid-1980s the company collaborated with C&J Clark to write shoe design software until a dispute about the intellectual property rights over the product caused a falling out.

In 1993 the company formed a partnership with DEPO GmbH and began development of machining STRATEGIST, a graphical based system limited solely to generating 3-axis Cnc instructions. This product was resold by DEPO in Germany and sometimes the rest of the world under the brand name Depocam.

In late 2001 NC Graphics licensed Vero International Software to use their software as a Computer-aided manufacturing Geometric modeling kernel within their system. In June 2002 they bought the machining STRATEGIST product and development team for £1.25million, leaving NC Graphics with rights to its own copy of the source code and the Depocam product.^[1]

On 16 May 2007 Parametric Technology Corporation acquired NC Graphics from Arthur Flutter for $7.2million,^[2] stating that it had 15 employees at the time.^[3] In its press briefing PTC confirmed that NC Graphics technology was licensed to 5 of the top 10 CAM vendors, including CNC Software (sellers of MasterCAM).^[4] The Depocam product is to be released as Pro/TOOLMAKER 8.1 in August 2007.^[5]