At the beginning of the 1990's a preeminent aircraft manufacturer embarked upon the first "paperless" design of a passenger jet. In keeping with this paradigm they sought a new "flexible" tooling technology that reduced the need for fixed or "hard" tooling and its attendant storage racks full of fixtures and monuments. The idea was to make use of computer-generated data sets to reconfigure a holding fixture into any form needed, eliminating the need to fabricate many different single purpose holding tools.