This simple aluminum ashtray represents a revolution in the machine tool industry. It was produced in 1959 as part of a demonstration of a milling machine controlled by a computer punch tape instead of a human operator. The development of this machine was more than a decade in the making and the result of a complex story about competing visions for this technology. After World War II, the U.S. Air Force gave several contracts to the Parsons Corporation to develop further the numerically control machining innovations made by its founder John Parsons. Interested in experiments being conducted at the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory, Parsons proposed in 1949 that MIT become a project subcontractor to provide expertise on automatic control. Over the next 10 years, MIT gained control over the entire project as the Servomechanisms Laboratory vision of “three-axis continuous path control” supplanted the original Parsons conception of “plunge-cutting positioning.” Conflict always shapes technology but this particular story, chronicled by historian David Noble, has become a significant object lesson in the history of technology.