I still don't buy it. Even in Aerospace or Automotive, put a modern CNC machine with modern CAD/CAM against a 20 year old machine with old computer and old CAD/CAM....no contest, productivity much higher today.
First, if you look around here a little you will find posts remarking on the fact that twenty year old machines are just as good if not better than what they are selling today. What they've done in the past twenty years, according to some is cheapified the product.
This isn't my claim, although I find it credible - you can only spin a ballscrew so fast. That's why I think linear motors are the next step - and that's what the OP was asking about.
Besides that, there's more than just milling in the world. A 1980 Giddings & Lewis or American Tool lathe will rip the brandiest newiest Haas a new asshole, eat the remaining pieces for breakfast then spit out the bones. Some things have gone backwards.
About CADCAM, what you said was
I'd second this. We have MUCH more powerful computers that are able to do very complex 3D modelling that were just not possible 20 years ago.
Have you ever used IceM ? Alias Auto Studio ? I-DEAS ? Wildfire ? Tebis ? Let's see an example of some "complex 3D modelling" that can't be done in those programs. All of them twenty or older.
If anything, the situation with cadcam is worse now than it was twenty years ago. Autodicks now owns most of them and their direction is to the graveyard.
And yes, all the advanced technologies in CAD/CAM have become accessible to small shops, something that absolutely was not available 20+ years ago.
Sorry, but it appears to me that prices are now higher than they were 20 years ago and choices more limited and worst of all, you're stuck running them on Windows.
Also, the complexity of parts being manufactureed has gone up as well. It would not have been practical say 30 years ago to build Apple iPhones
You've got to be shitting me .... you talk complex than pull an iPhone out as an example ? You could draw that pos in Bobcad 14 on DOS. Get serious. Try using a real CAD program before you say this stuff, it just makes you look silly.
with the CAD/CAM and CNC machines available at that time in the volumes we see today at the price points we see today...
The price point for the iPhone is because it's made in Wuxi by Foxconn, a Taiwanese slave driver company. Has nothing to do with advances in machining and even less with cadcam. Not a good example.
Also, we have robotics in play as well, making 24x7 lights out operation possible, don't believe that was available back then....
In 1993 I helped install two KT 200's that were auctioned out of McDonnell-Douglas in, I think, Kansas. 1982 machines. They were part of a DNC. 120 tool magazines, redundant tools, octal tool readers, tool life monitoring, process reporting, flexible pallet assignments, flexible scheduling and more, all controlled by a VAX and yup, 24/7 lights-out for sure.
I saw Hardinge with automated loading in ... 1980 Westec ? Liebherr had autoloading that I know of in 1972, I had an L300 with it. Pain in the rear to strip that crap off. Clevelands had autoloading in the fifties ? Sixties for sure. And automated inspection as well. Too bad ITW went tits-up, they had a lot of good stuff about that in their catalogs. Robots and other methods of automation have been around for decades, at least fifty years. Ask Carbide Bob.
You have no idea what was done in the past.
Now, if you have an old machine, and lots of time, and you don't care about your per part cost, OK sure, you can make it with older machine.....but that just reinforces my point, new machines have improved.
Sorry, but you are full of poop. New machines are marginally better than 1980 machines, maybe (they use a different philosophy, hard to say it's better or not but it is cheaper for the machine builder and purchaser, so maybe overall better) but the main thing that really differentiates a 1980 machine from one in 2020 is the reliability of electronics. Put new electronics on a KT200 and it'd still kick ass. It's just evolution, the gradual improvement of existing ideas, no big leaps.
Stuff is better but there hasn't been anything really revolutionary since 1975, when they first put a computer into the control.
(I'm thinking linear motors could be a big leap because they change the whole "how to move the axes" equation, but .... they aren't common yet )