"I completely concur with how the ' Graphic Engineering/Design' profession was first organized and developed during World War Two inside a government authorized war services department of Harley Earl's General Motors STYLING SECTION. This new conscious business activity – graphic engineering – became an offshoot enterprise of the automobile design profession that Harley Earl originally pioneered," said Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty, Ph.D in a 2006 phone interview. Dr. Hanratty is widely known today as "the Father of CADD/CAM." (Dr. Hanratty's contributions were directly towards creating CAD [more software related] rather than actual framework computing in which the IBM/Buick ad is basically demonstrating below.)

Dr. Hanratty's primary contribution is towering in the field of Computer Aided Drafting & Design manufacturing...for if you search the web, he's named the "father of cad." Not surprisingly he initially began his career at GM during the late 1950s when he was hired in to work on and develop a new system and/or code to extract "paperless designs" from computers on all sorts of engineering design-products for the world's largest manufacturer. This 1958 double-paged GM ad, featured below, from FORTUNE magazine for the Buick Division elaborates exactly how seriously this forward-minded corporation was considering the significant role computer-aided design (CAD) was going to play in making valuable contributions in the world's new automobile design manufacturing trade.

Double-page FORTUNE magazine article shown in its entirety below. Also make sure you check out GM photograph at very bottom. It's actually significant and proves a point how all GM's new VPs (in mid-50s) and other GM leaders were in harmony to the new direction Harley Earl was leading General Motors into the future.

Dr. Hanratty also pointed out how, "Harley J. Earl was the first person in the world to ever put a computer in a automobile when he incorporated them in his highly important Firebird experimental concept cars. GM was also the very first auto maker to have onboard computers built into their production cars. Nobody had ever done this before. Of course this "auto/computer" history is extremely important now considering the fact that every car in the world has a onboard computer(s) today...naturally, this includes almost every transportation product, too. It's a very significant American milestone when you think about it."

Harley Earl Pioneered using Computers in Automobiles and Trucks

The reason this 1956 GM photograph, above, is so significant today is that it demonstrates how six vice presidents of General Motors (one of which is Edward T. Ragsdale, who is shown in the cross-pollinating computer ad with IBM, at top) are all in harmony with Earl's new auto design & concept car order. The boy below is holding a model of the Firebird II which not only was the first titanium shelled car in the world, but was also the first GM experimental test vehicle to have an on-board computer! Each one of the men pictured here vice presidents of GM; Bunkie Knudsen, Ed Cole, Ed Ragsdale, Hafsteder, Goodman, etc, etc...