Carburetor Housing produced by SDRC:

Boeing started developing the Tiger system in the year 1979. Integrating B-splines along rational Bezier representation rapidly led to rational B-splines. Boeing felt so strongly regarding NURBS that they proposed them as partition of the standard to the August 1981 International Graphics Exchange standard meeting. In spite of the success of NURBS and the great deal of effort put into its growth, Boeing abandoned Tiger in the year 1984.

The year 1978, the company began working on a modeler. Following, SDRC, Versprille decided to utilize NURBS as a single representation form. Progress was announced publicly in the year 1982, and the modeler, known as Geomod, was released in the year 1983 (Figure 13). This was the first commercial modeler based wholy on NURBS.

B-splines have been the subject of much work at the University of Utah. After various years of research, Riesenfeld and his group place their research results into a modeler known as Alpha-1 (Figure 14). For various years, Alpha-1 has served like a research environment, however recently Engineering Geometry Systems created a commercial version available.

The above groups extremely influenced the growth of NURBS technology. Various companies followed their paths. Intergraph Corporation begun with Bezier in the B-surf-modeler in the year 1982 and incorporated non-uniform B-splines and NURBS in the year 1984. In the year of 1985, they begun to develop a new system known as I/EMS based wholly on NURBS.

The quick proliferation of NURBS is due partly to their outstanding properties and partly to their incorporation in such international and national standards like, PHIGS, IGES Product Data Exchange Specification and International Standard Office Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data.