Beginning in the 1940s the U.S. Air Force developed the earliest numerical control systems for the accurate and repeatable fabrication of aircrafts components. Although consisting simply of a series of machine operations encoded on punched paper type that controlled the functions of industrial machine tools, these techniques represented a revolution in manufacturing and were quickly adopted by other industries. In the 1960s digital computers began finding their way into the design of aircrafts and soon thereafter computers begun to replace paper type on the shop floor. In the 1970s and 1980s, the linkage of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing was adopted by other industries for the production of complex products like ships and automobiles. Although initially affordable for only big-ticket or high-volume products, rapid increases in computer power at ever decreasing costs eventually led to the proliferation in CAD/CAM and CNC fabrication in other areas of industrial design and manufacturing. Notoriously conservative and faced with narrow profit margins on largely one-off projects, the building industry has been slow in adopting these new technologies, except where applicable to produce clear efficiencies in preexisting business processes: the use of CAD in the production of two-dimensional construction documents, for example. Starting in the mid-1990s, however, three powerful forces began to emerge that are starting to transform significant aspects of both design practice and project delivery: intelligent, feature-based parametric modeling; building information modeling; and mass-customization. Each is based on the primacy of the “master” building model as the repository of both design intent and highly specific product information. Combined with the ability to use numerically controlled processes to directly implement this digital data for the actual construction of buildings, information technologies are undeniably of growing importance. As these technology becomes more widespread and affordable, their promise of faster, more flexible, and more cost-effective building processes is beginning to be realized in the architectural engineering and construction industries.