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CNC Machining: From Punch Cards to Precise, Identical Parts Fast!

Do you remember your parents talking about their experience with computers in school? My dad would always refer to ‘punch cards’ that had to be manually inserted into the computer to get the desired results. He says that it wasn’t until he was in college that he started using these punch cards to create simple accounting programs, and this was in the year 1977. The farthest back I can remember is to that one computer in the back of my second grade classroom and the big floppy disks (actual flexible floppy, not the hard disks yet) we inserted for some reason that’s a bit blurry to me now, probably some sort of ‘game’ to help us learn addition and subtraction. I was in second grade in 1989-1990, and the demise of punch cards wasn’t so long ago if you think about it. They were in common use through the mid-1970s; this decade marked the beginning of CNC machining and various computer numerical controlled devices.

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