【正文】 from human control of machine tools. Numerical control means the control of machine tools and other manufacturing systems through the use of prerecorded, written symbolic instructions. Rather than operating a machine tool, an NC technician writes a program that issues operational instructions to the machine tool. For a machine tool to be numerically controlled, it must be interfaced with a device for accepting and decoding the programmed instructions, known as a reader. Numerical control was developed to overe the limitation of human operators, and it has done so. Numerical control machines are more accurate than manually operated machines, they can produce parts more uniformly, they are faster, and the longrun tooling costs are lower. The development of NC led to the development of several other innovations in manufacturing technology: Electrical discharge machining,Laser cutting,Electron beam welding. Numerical control has also made machine tools more versatile than their manually operated predecessors. An NC machine tool can automatically produce a wide of parts, each involving an assortment of widely varied and plex machining processes. Numerical control has allowed manufacturers to undertake the production of products that would not have been feasible from an economic perspective using manually controlled machine tolls and processes. Like so many advanced technologies, NC was born in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The concept of NC was developed in the early 1950s 4 with funding provided by the . Air Force. In its earliest stages, NC machines were able to made straight cuts efficiently and effectively. However, curved paths were a problem because the machine tool had to be programmed to undertake a series of horizontal and vertical steps to produce a curve. The shorter the straight lines making up the steps, the smoother is the curve, Each line segment in the steps had to be calculated. This problem led to the development in 1959 of the Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) language. This is a special programming language for NC that uses statements similar to English language to define the part geometry, describe the cutting tool configuration, and specify the necessary motions. The development of the APT language was a major step forward in the fur ther development from those used today. The machines had hardwired logic circuits. The instructional programs were written on punched paper, which was later to be replaced by magic plastic tape. A tape reader was used to interpret the instructions written on the tape for the machine. Together, all of this represented a giant step forward in the control of machine tools. However, there were a number of problems with NC at this point in its development. A major problem was the fragility of the punched paper tape medium. It was mon for the paper tape containing the programmed instructions to break or tear during a machining process. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that each successive time a part was produced on a machine tool, the paper tape carrying the programmed instructions had to be rerun through the reader. If it was necessary to produce 100 copies of a given part, it was also necessary to run the paper tape through the reader 100 separate tines. Fragile paper tapes simply could not withstand the rigors of a shop floor environment and this kind of repeated use. This led to the development of a special magic plastic tape. Whereas the paper carried the programmed instructions as a s