e fins in missiles, but the missiles and the computers themselves were built by conventional factory technology. The first widespread use of computers in business was for book keeping and related functions, perhaps because keyboards and paper printers were already standard output and input devices for computers, so that writing programs to read, manipulate, and print out figures was a straightforward problem.
Only in the early 1960s were computers first applied directly to engineering design and manufacturing situations (Stark 2). The new technology first emerged in the aerospace industry, where computer controlled machines (aircraft and spacecraft) were familiar, and where production requirements were particularly suited to new approaches to manufacturing.
Traditionally, industrial production has taken place in two quite different types of facility, the "job shop" and the "assembly line." A job shop is a general purpose industrial facility; essentially a machine shop, equipped with a standard variety of general purpose machine tools: drills, lathes, punches, and so on (Lenz 31-34). A wide variety of industrial processes can be carried out by a well equipped job shop; indeed, it is limited virtually only by the number and capacity of its machine tools. A particular job can be scheduled and run in a variety of different ways, according to requirements and availability.
The job shop is highly flexible, but it is also expensive and in some ways often highly unproductive. For a given "job" (i.e., manufacture of a given item), one machine tool may be swamped with a backlog of work, while another goes unused. Moreover, each job has
...