Introduction A metaphor of weightlessness and immateriality dominates computational discourses about design. Digital information, it is often assumed, travels seamlessly through invisible networks in its disembodied binary form-existing merely as a symbolic entity. Despite recent appeals to design's materiality, particularly in discourses about digital fabrication in architecture, material formations are generally considered an effect of these ethereal transactions. Thus, the materiality of

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... tal information, its (often messy) substrates-such as wires, voltages, disks, and drives, as well as the socio-technical processes involved in their definition and production-are black-boxed: hidden from view. This article explores the intellectual and material history of numerically controlled machines, and of the software that drove them, and shows that a new theoretical understanding of materials and geometry as computable, linked to the emergence of software and numerically controlled machines, emerged from the Cold War era entanglement of military, industrial, and academic interests. I show how in their quest to automate machine tools, the first numerical control researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) codified the cognitive and bodily roles of machine tool operators, as well as the properties of materials and machines, thus uncovering new questions of data storage, management, and exchange. Confronting these questions, numerical control researchers developed new languages for geometric and material inscription-software-that were crucially informed by the physical constraints imposed by available storage media, such as punched paper tape. From this negotiation between symbolic abstractions and material systems, new programming techniques and, crucially, the first theory of computer-aided design emerged. 1 Thus, software started to become both a vehicle for and an expression of a technical and conceptual reconfiguration of design, linked to the manipulation of materials, engineering efficiency, and militaristic control. I intend to show that software, understood as an organized set of declarative statements with both semantic and operational values, can itself be seen as a design theory encoding this reconfiguration.