ABSTRACT
By the middle of the 1950s, numerical control had emerged from the military drawing boards of science-based technology as a sophisticated, if rather complex and expensive, solution to the problem of machine tool automation. Existing technologies have rarely if ever been put to the rigorous tests of any disciplined "natural selection." The Darwinian ideology of technological progress, therefore, which celebrates the survival of the fittest, does not so much side with technical or economic superiority as with social power. In so doing, it blinds society to the full range of possibilities available to it as well as to the realities of its own history, structure, and cultural make-up. For these reasons, any effort to reconstruct lost alternatives, to travel down roads not taken, serves several purposes at once. Initial technical shortcomings and political and institutional constraints thus hampered the further development and commercial success of record-playback.
