The Giddings & Lewis Episode

In the early 1970s, at the Giddings & Lewis machine tool plant in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a group of machinists began using a technology called manual data input (MDI) to write and edit numerical control programs directly at their workstations, without routing the programming through a separate engineering department. The machinists were not credentialed programmers. They were production workers who understood the materials, the machines, and the work. Their programming was often faster, more accurate, and more responsive to actual shop conditions than the programs produced by the remote engineering department. Noble's documentation of management's response to this development — restricting access to MDI consoles, requiring engineering-department review of machinist-written programs, and in some plants removing MDI capability entirely — became one of his most telling case studies of how alternative designs are actively suppressed when they distribute power in ways management finds threatening.