Originally Posted by
CONSO
Actually boeing did build a few ' boats' years ago
1) a jet powered pickle fork hydroplane used for testing
2) A few hydrofoils for navy in the 60's
Plus, the first airplanes built by boeing were seaplanes which are kinda part time boats.
Originally Posted by
CONSO
But one still must ask why any machine tool was ever connected to internet in first place
Well I would expect that automated production tooling would be connected to a network, for various reasons, production monitoring, transfer of data from design or from other production divisions, quality control processes, and probably a host of other reasons I can't even imagine. the alternative you seem to be suggesting is that each discrete machine would have an air gap with the outside world, which would require manually transferring data with physical storage media, when data was required to be transferred to other areas production area. That would be: a) cumbersome, b). no guarantee that the data transferred didn't contain any virus.