Memory Gives Simple NC a New Lease of Life

Summary

All NC systems must make use of a storage media of some form or other, but the system in-house memory has, until recently, been limited in capacity and overall performance has been restricted by the difficulty in accessing the main data storage easily and quickly.

Now the advent of cheap memory devices is permitting sophisticated features such as edit, macros and other program manipulations to be offered with simple, low cost NC. This paper traces the history of storage devices used for NC and discusses how recent devices provide the machine tool industry with increased production. A current example, encompassing a considerable application of new memory devices resulting in a new concept for simple NC, is discussed in some depth.