NURBSThe gotdevelopment startedof ''Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline'' (NURBS)originated with seminal work at [[Boeing]] and [[SDRC]] (Structural Dynamics Research Corporation) in the 1980s and '90s, a leading company that led in mechanical computer-aided engineering in thethose 1980s and '90'syears.<ref>[http://isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=14940 "NURBS and CAD: 30 Years Together"], Ushakov, Dmitry, isicad, December 30, 2011.</ref> TheBoeing's historyinvolvement ofin NURBS at Boeing goesdates back to 1979, when Boeingthey began to staff up for the purpose of developing their own comprehensive CAD/CAM system, TIGER, to support the widediverse varietyneeds of applications needed by their various aircraft and aerospace engineering groups. Three basic decisions were critical to establishing an environment conducive to developing NURBS. The first was Boeing's need to develop their own in-house geometry capability. Boeing had special, rather sophisticated, surface geometry needs, especially for wing design, that could not be found in any commercially available [[CAD/CAM]] system. As a result, the TIGER Geometry Development Group was established in 1979, and has been strongly supported for many years. The second decision critical to NURBS development was the removal of the constraint of upward geometrical compatibility with the two systems in use at Boeing at that time. One of these systems had evolved as a result of the iterative process inherent to wing design. The other was best suited for adding to the constraints imposed by manufacturing, such as cylindrical and planar regions. The third decision was simple but crucial and added the 'R' to 'NURBS'. Circles were to be represented exactly: no cubic approximations would be allowed.
By late 1979, there were 5 or 6 well-educated mathematicians (PhD's from Stanford, Harvard, Washington and Minnesota) and some had many years of software experience, but none of them had any industrial, much less CAD, geometry experience. Those were the days of the oversupply of math PhDs. The task was to choose the representations for the 11 required curve forms, which included everything from lines and circles to Bézier and B-spline curves.
