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Digital architecture developed in the 1960s and, supported by CAAD the 1990s,has created the path towards an architecture produced by computer and architectin a mutual relationship. The evolution of architecture since the 1970s led to thebeginning of the first digital turn in the 1990s, and subsequently to the emergenceof new typologies of buildings, architects and design tools; atom-based, bit-based(virtual) [1], and cyber-physical as a combination of both. The paper provides aninsight into historical foundations of CAAD insofar as it engages with complexityin mechanics, geometry, and space between the 1600s and 1950s. I will address aselection of principles discovered, and mechanisms invented beforecomputer-aided-architectural-design; those include the typewriter, the Cartesiangrid and a pre-cyber-physical system by Hermann von Helmholtz. The paperconcludes with a summary and an outlook to the future of CAAD challenged bythe variety of correlations of disparate data sets.