The programmable machine tool
The first machines with NC control were created in the 1940s and 1950s from existing machine tools, modified with motors that could move controls to follow points fed into the system on punched tape or magnetic tape. To do this, the NC control used an abstraction of the object to be created in the form of a mathematical model and corresponding instructions to the machine.
The aim was to precisely determine the motion sequence of a machine tool automated in this way and thus achieve new accuracies on the workpiece. This was because the manual guidance of the tools could not meet the ever-increasing manufacturing requirements that aviation and other industries were placing on them.
During the ongoing attempts to retrofit the existing machines, it became clear that NC technology and machine designs are closely linked. More and more specially developed and built NC machines with more stable designs and components geared to the new requirements came into being. In the industrialized countries of Europe, the first NC machine celebrated its market launch in 1959.