CNC demo momento

[bob ward]

Came across this in a long neglected drawer recently.

University of Queensland Open Day, June 1980, School of Mechanical Engineering. I can still remember being blown away by the process. They bolted a rectangle of aluminium down in a perspex cabinet, there was a flurry of cutters and coolant, and hey presto, a super cool aluminium bottle opener emerged. All very exciting cutting edge stuff.

[oldtiffie]

A long way

Bob,

Thank you - that was a blast from the past.

Swinburne University - which had the first AutoDesk Authorised Training Centre (Department) in OZ -at about that time had a "Roland" CNC-ed (or was it NC?) small two or three axis cutting head. It was very small - in a cabinet like some of the acoustic hoods like those for dot-matrix printers. It was controlled as I recall by a type of DXF file (from AutoCAD).

It had a huge "WOW" factor and was more than evolutionary - it was revolutionary!!! The great and mighty just had to be seen to not only with it but to comment knowingly about it!!! It was at about AutoCAD 2.17 as I recall. It was a huge success for Swinburne which really showed it (and themselves) off - big time at the first ever AutoCAD Users Conference in OZ as well - huge bragging rights - and bragging - of course.

I can't remember if it was done on an early "high-end" ("SPARC"??) work-station or a main-frame (aka "Big Iron") or on a 8088/8086 PC running under IBM DOS.

My first computer was an NEC APC111 - with two 5 1/4" x 180KB floppies and two "huge" (physically too) 10MB hard drives - one internal and one external - and I still shudder about the cost - huge!!! The jump to my next computer -a "Compaq" 386/20 (used!!) was huge too.

We've come a long way.