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==Historical notes==
The need of the U.S. Air Force for templates more precise than could be obtained by state-of-the-art methods of the late 1940s inspired [[John Parsons]]<sup>[http://www.autofieldguide.com/columns/0498stic.html]</sup>, President of the Parsons Works of Traverse City, Michigan, to propose that a by-the-numbers technique (commonly used by [[machinist]]s of that era) be placed under servo control with positional data generated by a computer, thereby providing much more data than would be practical by means of hand calculations. His concept was to machine to setpoints as guides for subsequent manual finishing, that is, to speed up a manual process so more points could be included.
Mr. Parsons' project was enjoined by the Servo Mechanisms Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and redefined as interpolative positional control that caused the cutting tool to traverse a series of straight lines between defined points at a prescribed rate of travel. Thus, the cutting tool would be almost constantly on the programmed contour and would spend very little of its time making non-cutting moves.
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