The irony of this being a long scroll of centered text without any images or photos is quite a bit of cognitive dissonance.

For folks who are curious how the story continues, there is:

https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/introduction

(which has some overlap)

For my part, I was long stymied in doing anything beyond basic 2D by the tools available and CPU speeds/memory limitations --- OpenSCAD was the first 3D software I was successful with, and since then I've moved on to the Python-enabled soft-fork:

https://pythonscad.org/

though I've been trying to work out how to nicely create apps for making projects with acceptable wireframe previews:

https://studio.flet.dev/run/bicQWc3Aul/

which I hope to make projects such as:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cncwoodworking/comments/1xto532/bam...