One of the most fundamental concepts in the area of advanced manufacturing technologies is numerical control (NC).Prior to the advent of NC, all machine tools were manual operated and controlled. Among the many limitations associated with manual control machine tools, perhaps none is more prominent than the limitation of operator skills. With manual control, the quality of the product is directly related to and limited to the skills of the operator . Numerical control represents the first major step away from human control of machine tools.

Numerical control means the control of machine tools and other manufacturing systems though the use of prerecorded, written symbolic instructions. Rather than operating a machine tool, an NC technician writes a program that issues operational instructions to the machine tool, For a machine tool to be numerically controlled , it must be interfaced with a device for accepting and decoding the p2ogrammed instructions, known as a reader.

Numerical control was developed to overcome the limitation of human operator , and it has done so . Numerical control machines are more accurate than manually operated machines , they can produce parts more uniformly , they are faster, and the long-run tooling costs are lower . The development of NC led to the development of several other innovations in manufacturing technology:

1. Electrical discharge machining.

2. Laser cutting.

3. Electron beam welding.

Numerical control has also made machine tools more versatile than their manually operated predecessors. An NC machine tool can automatically produce a wide variety of par4s , each involving an assortment of undertake the production of products that would not have been feasible from an economic perspective using manually controlled machine tools and processes.

Like so many advanced technologies , NC was born in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . The concept of NC was developed in the early 1950s with funding provided by the U.S Air Force .In its earliest stages , NC machines were able to make straight cuts efficiently and effectively.

However ,curved paths were a problem because the machine tool had to be programmed to undertake a series of horizontal and vertical steps to produce a curve. The shorter is the straight lines making up the step ,the smoother is 4he curve . Each line segment in the steps had to be calculated.

This problem led to the development in 1959 of the Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) language for NC that uses statements similar to English language to define the part geometry, describe the cutting tool configuration, and specify the necessary motions. The development of the APT language was a major step forward in the further development of NC technology. The original NC system were vastly different from those used punched paper , which was later to replaced by magnetic plastic tape .A tape reader was used to interpret the instructions written on