Little more than a decade ago computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) was a very esoteric field indeed, not one that was of much practical concern to a manager or industrialist unless his business was on the scale of, say, a major automobile manufacturer or in a field of high technology such as aerospace. Like so much else, this situation was revo- lutionized by the invention of the silicon chip, the arrival of the micro- processor and the dramatic fall in the cost of computer hardware. Today, CAD/CAM has spread down the market, and down the price scale, to the point at which it is...