ABSTRACT
Quality in manufacturing has always been of interest to American industry. It has only been within the past decade, however, that computers have been applied to automating the quality assurance task. The batch processing of mainframe computers of the pre-1970 era was not applicable to real-time operation, and these computers were much too costly for dedicated industrial operations. When the development of minicomputers opened the door to manufacturing applications of computers, inspection was one of the first tasks considered. This chapter focuses on some of these early efforts which matured to a wide range of commercial inspection products in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The National Science Foundation undertook a Production Research and Technology program between 1973 and 1982. The objective of this program was to develop a new technology called "programmable automation" to advance automation in batch manufacturing of discrete products for both economic and social reasons.
