most of my programming was done with pencil and paper and a calculator with g codes ,i did lots of profileing cutting out shapes with ripper cutters finishing were required with end mills using cutter compensation .i often used a 63 mm facing cutter for shaping.the first machine was a beaver nc retrofitted localy latter i had older mazak machining centres, interesting calculations when using a 12 position indexer shaping on each face at different angles.the early machines the compensation was not just g41 of g42 g38 g39i and j required at each change of angle. G45 g46 g47 g48 were handy for inside square holes or around basic sqare shapes I started with only an edit program on apple 64 .they were paper tape machines.often falts on tapes so i would have to look at the holes to find what was missing. and make a new tape.these machines came from north company they moved into our factory .they had a mini main frame that only had a tape punch and reader ,the people that did the programming didn't come so i was left to find out what was wrong when the programs that would not work .i had to work out how that compensation was done on those old machines.i did programs where i run out of tools ,line numbers unto 1000 and offset numbers that could be used .after 15 years of that i could make those machines do what i wanted .The company bought a cad system that was meant to use the drawings for the cam part but the post processor was not able to cope with a 2 and a 1/2 axis machine
only 2 axis on 1 line .it didn't work that well it was meant to work on dos but was set up on windows.i didn't use it much .i was retrenched about 2000 from that job.i had other jobs on much more modern machines after that.
