ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the development of NC-technologies for machine tools in the USA and Germany since their inception at the end of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1950s. Initially work process-oriented NC-technology emerged as a minor side line in the course of NC-development: in the United States sporadic, yet repeated attempts were made with different types of directly programmable control systems. In the Federal Republic of Germany work process-oriented NC-technology was pursued in a far more systematic manner than in the United States. At the latest, from the mid-1970s on, the work process-oriented path of NC-development in the form of manual data input indisputably became the basis of a highly successful development surge of NC-technology in Germany. It was determined by pragmatic, manufacturing-technological criteria which were directed toward achieving the broadest and most problem-free utilization possible especially through a high level of organizational flexibility in the use of NC-technology as a means of rationalization.
