https://medium.com/cnc-life/history-of-cnc-machining-part-1-2a4b290d994d
The folks over at Bantam Tools, who make a desktop milling machine, are dropping a nice history lesson for us, in order to educate makers on where CNC mills came from. The series starts with a brief breakdown of some of the common terms you’ll encounter and then jumps right in. What they are specifically covering is methods of control, rather than the various types of mills that exist. You’re not going to get a full history of machining on all scales, but your understanding of the lineage of Computer Numerical Control will be much deeper.
https://medium.com/cnc-life/history-of-cnc-machining-part-2-the-evolution-from-nc-to-cnc-4b9fe1653536
Broken into 3 parts, you can follow along as we go from punch card systems to more and more complex control. See what happened as the transistor gave us exponentially more computing power, and CAD became prevalent.
https://medium.com/cnc-life/history-of-cnc-machining-part-3-from-the-factory-floor-to-the-desktop-b16cc35ef7be
The series concludes with a dive into how CAD and CAM software has evolved, which is pretty fascinating. Ultimately, they end at modern day desktop CNC mills (which makes sense for a manufacturer of desktop mills), and you get a fairly solid foundation of knowledge of CNC history.
