In 2016, SCADA is a known and consolidated technology: many brands have complete proposals for process control and supervision.
But when in 1986 the New Pignone DSA Rome (Automation Systems Division) installed the first license of “THE FIX” it immediately appeared as a real turning point: the automation of plants had entered the culture of a country that had a great desire to renew itself.
Here is the story of those who "discovered" that system in the USA and strongly believed it could also be a success in Italy: Enzo Maria Tieghi, currently CEO of ServiTecno.
“The first PC was released on the market in 1981: in 1982 we bought our own first PC XT paid about 5 million lire at the time (as much as a car) (64kb of Ram, later increased to 128kb), two 5” floppy disks (one of which was replaced with the first 10Mb hard disk, costing more than a million lire).
1985 the first contacts with Intellution, Steve Rubin (Founder and CEO), visionary and pioneer of the use of PCs in an industrial environment.
At the beginning of 1986 the first systems based on "The Fix" are installed by Intellution (Intelligent Solution) small company based on Route 128, the Boston bypass. At the intersection with Route1: in this area the excellence of New England's High-Tech begins to concentrate, which will evolve into the nascent Information Technology industry.
Here are Digital Equipment, Analog Devices, Computer Associate, Data General, Honeywell Information Systems, Compuetervision, EMC, Sun Microsystems, Autodesk, Raytheon, Wang Labs, Foxboro, Fisher Scientific, etc.
At that time Intellution consisted of 10 software engineers/engineers, a secretary and a handyman accountant.
Most of the developers had come out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and had experience in instrumentation and process control companies: from this came the idea of using the first Personal Computers instead of expensive and bulky intelligent color terminals connected to DEC computers /PDP, Honeywell and Data General.
For some years I had been selling in Italy the intelligent color terminals of a small company near Munich, Germany, HMW: they were programmable terminals (in some ways competitors of Tektronix) that some Italian companies used as MMI front-ends ( Man-machine interface, at the time they were called that, then for the "political correctness" they began to be called HMI, perhaps because the male-dominated industrial world had begun to see the first female engineers and operators appear) connected to Digital Equipment PDP computers for industrial applications: what would later be called SCADA were developed for the supervision of aqueducts, oil and gas pipelines, pumping stations, extraction platforms, etc.
In 1984 during a trip to the USA to visit the ISA Show and in specialized magazines such as Intech, I saw the first PCs used in the laboratory and in the factory. I began to inform myself and get a demo sent: a series of 5-inch floppies to be installed, with some difficulty, on our first PCs. In those days there was no internet (not even cell phones and the first fax machines still had prohibitive prices).
In 1985, during a meeting in Germany, a customer asked me if I had ever seen one of these "programs" that allowed a PC to be used as one of the expensive and complicated terminals that they used in their systems and that I sold them: they were evaluating alternatives. Just to do the math: one of the terminals that I sold them cost between 20 and 30 million lire plus an unknown (many) number of man-hours to configure and install it. A PC cost around 6 million, the software around 8, but above all, half the hours were enough to develop a nice application, and then it was easier to maintain.
At the beginning of 1986 the first orders: one from Nuovo Pignone DSA Rome (Automation Systems Division) one from Honeywell Process Control Division, Milan. The first “The Fix” in Italy!
Some to follow Building Monitoring applications in Museums (see photo below) ed a large application for Energy Monitoring at IBM, Vimercate plant: 9 stations supervising the 9 internal electrical substations. At that time, the Vimercate plant was one of the largest in Europe for IBM and churned out systems that were exported all over the world, and the tiny Intellution was a "partner" of the giant IBM in this new market which saw the use of PCs not only in the office but also in the factory.”
From 1986 to 2016 there were thousands of applications created with "THE FIX", which later became FIXDmacs, FIX32, up tocurrent iFIX finished in the early 2000s under the hat of the largest multinational in the world, General Electric.
Given the early introduction on the market compared to the competition, FIX has been able to establish itself in all sectors where it is necessary to automate or even just control the process: Pharmaceutical, Steel sector, F&B, Utility, Building Automation...the diffusion of the first SCADA platform in Italy was very rapid, its technological development rapid but based on a very solid foundation.
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