Talking Shop
FEATURING:
TALKING SHOP WITH: Pat Boland — Co-Founder and Managing Director, ANCA Group Could you give us a brief overview of how you and Pat McCluskey came to found ANCA in 1974? We were working with minicomputers at the time and got the idea of modifying them to direct simple operations on the NC machine tools that were then available, effectively developing early versions of today’s CNC machines. We quickly realized that Australia, where we are headquartered, wasn’t the most productive place to market this technology, so we were lucky to have a colleague in the United States who introduced us to machine tool OEMs who incorporated
the controllers we were developing into their cutter/grinder machines in Indianapolis. This was in the early eighties, and by then we’d realized we wanted an end user product of our own, so we designed and manufactured a CNC cutter/grinder prototype that we took to IMTS in 1986. We sold that machine, learned out lessons from the experience, and began improving our product. We felt like our concept was sound, designing software to measure grinding cutting tools in process, if we could only streamline the technology and find the right markets.
When Pat McCluskey and Pat Boland founded ANCA over 40 years ago in 1974, they purchased a mini computer for $4,000. Their basic idea was to replace the hardwired controls of the time with a standard computer. Adding the computer to NC thus CNC resulted in a much more powerful and flexible technology than the hardwired logic designs that were current at the time.
8 | IMD | Q4 2020
