CADAM, or Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing, is one of a group of related acronyms which have emerged in recent years to describe related processes: the more extensive use of computers in industrial design and manufacturing, in such diverse forms as computerized drafting tables, "industrial robots," and driverless automatic freight vehicles. The following report is an outline of the functions and applications of CADAM and its related technologies in industry. The essential feature of CADAM is that it opens a fundamental new option in manufacturing, one intermediate between handbuilt "job shop" production and assembly line type mass production. As will be seen, it thus makes possible sharp increases in productivity and therefore sharp reductions in price for a great many types of industrial and consumer products. At a time when concern for productivity is particularly great, the importance of such a fundamental jump in productivity is clear (Jurgen 4-22).
"Automation" is a long established concept, going back in some forms to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Yet through most of that period, the actual application of automation was extremely limited. The whole cultural tradition of the factory worker as dominated and dehumanized by machines is in large measure a testimony to the limits of traditional automation. Individual machines at a factory might perform an automatic cycle when a single button was pressed, but a worker had to stand reader to press that button every few seconds as work was positioned in front of the machine. As simple a task as fastening a couple of bolts to a framework and tightening them would typically not be automated, but assigned to a worker who spent his day repeating that task.
Even the introduction of computers in the late 1940s and 1950s did not immediately change this. Computers were used to monitor and control extremely complex motions by rocket nozzles and guidanc...