I had to reply to this...
I'm going to show my age here.
I worked in the Aero-space ind in So Cal in the 60's an 70's.
I worked at a place with a then state of the art machine shop. They had N/C (numerical control) machines of all types and size's.
The quality of the Programming had to be high. Not everyone could do it right.
Same with operators and machinist's. They are not all equal.
CNC grew out of N/C.
They had huge dedicated solid state controls.
G.E. was the leader for a long time.
Japanese took over the ind and CNC took over from N/C.
I always wondered what happened to all those old machines. Did they get new PC controls???