General Development & Application 
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>>> Eugene Sevin 06/16/03 05:36PM >>>
Hi, Love to reminisce. My recollection of the several years prior to the MacNeal-Schwendler publication of NASTRAN is hazy but I'm pretty sure that NASA (I think Langley) canvassed the aerospace industry for a year or so to determine there evolving FEM capabilities. They strung all of these together and came up with a blueprint for a master NASA FEM capability that, in sum, exceed what any one company could do. Eventually they went out for bid that was won by M-S. I was at IIT Research Institute at the time where we were working on the first structural dynamics FEM applications and participated in informal discussions with NASA and others on the scope of the NASTRAN RFP, which I think was toned down considerably from NASA's first draft..

Somewhere about this time, perhaps a few years earlier, when the volume of numerically oriented papers submitted to the Journal of Applied Mechanics began to take off, the editor, the late Dan Drucker, issued a manifesto (so to speak) that the JAM would not become a journal of numerical methods in applied mechanics, and the numerically oriented clods should go elsewhere. A few young turks at the time, myself included, lobbied in opposition. The following is taken from the CONCAM (Committee on Computing in Applied Mechanics) web site who were trying to do an Eyewitness-like thing for themselves), see

http://www.egr.msu.edu/asme/concam/history.html

"In the summer of 1969, the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME held a special conference on computational approaches at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The proceedings volume was entitled "Computational Approaches in Applied Mechanics" - edited by Eugene Sevin. The members of the Program Committee were Richard Bellman, SJ Fenves, DS Griffin, WC Reynolds, RM Bakke, S Batdorf, DA Beaty, HP Fullerton, AA Pouring, D Witkin and P Chiarulli. The success of this conference resulted in the AMD Executive Committee forming a Committee on Computing in Applied Mechanics, as described in the following Annual Report excerpt..."

While this would appear to be drifting off your topic, I'm pretty sure the referenced proceedings dealt with FEM. As editor, you might think I'd have a copy. I do but who knows where. You might have a copy in your archives. Gene

Eugene Sevin, Lyndhurst, OH

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