Re: OT?:Who made the first PC based CNC control?

If I'm not mistaken, the 8 bit Intel 8000(?) and Zilog Z80 were
originally developed as machine control microprocessors. Some
enterprizing guys (forget their name) designed the Altair which
could act as a "real" computer and sold it as a kit in the back of
Popular electronic Magazine. You booted it by flipping switches on
it front panel and looking at its pilot lights. They used a 100
contact bus (S-100) as they could pick up the connectors cheaply on
the surplus market. Imsai copied them and also made available a
fully built unit (as eventually did Altair). Generally, once you
could afford a floppy disk drive (8") they all ran on the CP/M
operating system (Digital Research). This sparked an industry in the
late 70's and early 80's of "compatable S100 computers by such as
Godbout, IMS, California Computer Systems, Ithaca Intersystems,
Delta Products. Allegidly all of their boards were supposed to be
interchangable (yea right!). There were definately A/D converters
and digital I/O relay cards as well as the usual parallel and serial
ports in those days. These machines (along with the competeing
Japanese models such as the NEC PC-8001 which was definately used
for machine control) were wiped out when the IBM PC and other 16 bit
systems came out.

We have come full circle. Originally the PC was designed around
chips designed for machine control. We are now taking PC's with
chips designed for office automation functions and turning them into
machine controllers. We use gadgets like keyboard emulators to
allow us touse push buttons instead of keyboards, when the original
challenge was to put a keyboard onto a machine which operated by
flipping switches.

Go figure!

Jeff

--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com, Chuck Knight
<chuckknight@h...> wrote:

> >
> >
> >>Who made the first PC based CNC control? I would also like to

know if

> >>there was one around before IBM marketed the PC in the early

1980's.

> >>
> >Huh? How could this be? How could a CNC control be based on a
> >commercial product that did not exist? Do you mean a CNC control
> >based on a commercial minicomputer product, rather than a

proprietary

> >control/computer all in one? I saw a PDP-8 minicomputer used as a
> >CNC control in 1972 or so, and it was old, then.
> >
>
> Uh, IBM PC was commercially introduced in 1981, and there were
> microcomputers (Apple, for instance, and IMSAI, Kaypro, TI and a

few

> hundred others) well before them. The amount of processing power

needed

> to control the moves of a stepper motor is not particularly

great. The

> g-code interpreter would have run pretty slow, but even so it'd be
> faster than a human operator.
>
> My old Xerox 820 could have done it with ease, and it was based on

the

> same base technology as the PDP series. So could my old Cromemco
> system...and that was a multi-user UNIX-based system from the

1970s! I

> wasn't interested in CNC at that point, but there were no

technical

> limitations that would have prevented such a system from working

as a

> controller.
>
> -- Chuck Knight