I used to use a cnc machine running off of DOS adapted in electrically to a broken paper tape machine and it used a terminal to type into norton commander to edit the x,y parameters. Man that she was old, we even had an old optical plotter. This was around 10 years ago and our worst problem was finding hard drives small enough for the DOS to install on. This was before linux had virtual box and all that shit. The guy was really smart and used linux to play chess online, super nerd but smart as all fuck.