Asianometry - Fanuc and the NC Revolution

My comment;

That was really interesting. Thank you. The causal gap between reading binary integers off a paper tape and the movement of the tool in that MIT machine controller is intriguing. There's quite a lot to do, because you have to parse the stream of numbers into at least x, y and z movements, but there must also have been some sort of timing control or feedback-driven wait condition. That's not too much short of a Turing nachine.

In the early seventies, losses in a manufacturing downturn in the US, caused by tightening credit and a slowdown in the aerospace industry in the mid sixties, resulted in the merger of most small macine-tool businesses. See the book When the machine stopped : a cautionary tale from industrial America which is also available on the Internet Archive and tells the story of Burgmaster and its acquisition by Houdaille Industries. 

This was the start of the long slow decline of American manufacturing which started sixty years ago.  See Destin Testing the US Supply Chain. 

See also Private Equity in the US and Participatory Budgeting Versus Private Equity. 

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