Proposed Hardware and Software For a Computer Aided Design Company

A scanner may also be of use to the company, or a digital camera, depending on what exactly the company was designing. Images of high quality can be obtained from the use of a digital camera, and there are many high-resolution scanners that would allow the company to scan in pictures that will be needed in the design of the product they are creating. Whether the company chose a scanner with OCR (optical Character Recognition) would be there choice, though it would not be necessary.

The software the company would need would probably be specialist software, rather than off-the-shelf packages. However as well as this the company would need the relevant software to co-ordinate the input and output devices (this normally comes with the hardware). An operating system, such as Microsoft Windows, would be essential, and it may also be useful to the company to have a word processing and a database package. This would allow the company to keep their accounts on computer and allow them to send mail merge letters, for example.

Output devices the company would need are obviously a printer. I would expect them to choose a colour laser printer, as this provides the best quality printouts, quickly and quietly. The expense of the toner cartridges would be easily justified, as the plans/posters the company will be creating are essential to their business. If the company need to produce detailed line drawings a plotter would be ideal. The company would also need a visual display unit. As they will undoubtedly want to work with many colours and a high resolution the type of VDU I would recommend is an XGA (extended graphics array), which has a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. The company may even want a screen with an even higher resolution.

As for the memory required by the company, they will need a very powerful processor, perhaps a 1GB processor. They will also need enough RAM to run all the applications. As well as the company will need non-volatile memory, ROM. This could be anything from magnetic tapes to optical disks. I think it would be advisable for the company to have a large hard disk drive, to save templates on, for example. Floppy Disks would not really be a suitable solution as they aren't big enough to hold large picture files, for examples. CD-Rs or CD-RWs would be more suitable to save individual design projects on, and magnetic tape, such as Digital Linear Tape, would be a suitable method of backing storage due its large memory capabilities.