"Kirk Gordon" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

That's pretty much it. It should be pointed out that it was controlled
by a
computer, not by a simple logic controller, so it was also the first CNC
machine.

Really? Are you sure? I didn't know that!

Well, I'm sure to the degree that the people who researched and wrote the
rest of what I posted about it made a very big point of it around 25 years
ago. American Machinist was deeply involved in reporting on it ever since
Parsons got the ball rolling. The people who wrote that material above knew
him well, and were in on the whole thing.

It was a modest computer they say, but a computer nonetheless, that the
MIT/Air Force/Parsons research machine was controlled by.

Incidentally, there were tape-controlled machine tools going back to 1906,
but they never went anywhere until Parsons got the Air Force involved. They
were sort of machine-tool versions of the old punch-card-controlled weaving
looms.

Ed Huntress