An article by Enzo M Tieghi

A photo from 1992 (published on InTech of ISA.org in January 1993), a historical artifact, emerges from a frame in the meeting room: it portrays my father Eraldo (then 72 years old), his brother Vittorio (then 59 years old), my brother Gianluigi (then 44 years old) and myself in my 37 years. It is a significant photo, four lives of "Tieghis" linked by the red thread of industrial instrumentation and its evolution from analog to digital.

I remember those years, when the PC was on all the desks in the offices and began to be used more and more also in industrial applications, with SCADA software products (and "our" iFix was among the first to arrive on the market) in stand-alone and then distributed, in Client-Server architecture.

What happened in those years?

First of all, the era of monolithic and proprietary systems has ended, and the era of:
– Smaller PLCs, easily configurable, and with more affordable costs.
– “Non-proprietary” HMI/SCADA, on PC, in Windows, with advanced graphics and simple to configure
– Faster industrial networks (no longer just “serial”), based on ethernet with open and standard protocols

Mid 90s: the advent of PLC with new architectures

In the mid-90s, new PLCs from Siemens (SIMATIC S7) and Rockwell Automation (ControlLogix) arrived on the market: two systems, one German/European, the other Made-in-USA which were a departure from what the industry was used since the 70s. Much more modular and compact than their predecessors, they had the signature of experienced industrial designers who proved that PLCs could be "beautiful", even if they were intended to be enclosed in electrical cabinets.

They also had features that allowed them to be used in a multitude of new applications: fast and intelligent backplanes greatly improved communication between multiple PLCs, intelligent IO and special function modules, software configurable, capable of handling diagnostics and more information.

With the new PLCs came new programming tools that made it easier: we saw tag databases that allowed descriptive names to be assigned to IOs rather than cryptic addresses. Intelligent modules, for counting and weighing that can be configured directly with the programming software, allowing counting in the device, to be used directly in the PLC program in units of measure. Perhaps the winning move was the integration of the motion of the logic: it is now possible to program sequences on multiple axes with complex and coordinated movements between multiple servomotors directly in the PLC.

90s, Windows, Windows and Windows

At the beginning of the 90s, IBM and Microsoft launch graphic environments with GUI (Graphical User Interface) for PCs: OS/2 for IBM, Windows for Microsoft, both multitasking, as a logical evolution of DOS which had accompanied the first years of use of PCs , with limited and labor intensive graphics.

IBM's OS/2, although more solid and advanced, did not however have the commercial success of the Microsoft product, which at the end of 1994 launched Windows 95 on the market, the version of Windows that still today marks the "look-and-feel" of operating systems with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). Before then, with MS-DOS, the configuration tools were primitive and complex and the graphical interfaces were anything but standardized: Windows95 allowed first in technical applications (CAD, CAM, etc.) and then in industry of factory automation and process control, to abandon the heavy proprietary hardware in use until then and to embrace the modern PC architecture as platforms for displaying machinery and plants on the high resolution screen, in industry as in utilities.

In 1992, we at ServiTecno started distributing and supporting the first versions of FIX HMI/SCADA with GUI (Graphical User Interface) for OS/2 and then in 1994 for Windows. In 1995 with the advent of Windows95, the first 16bit version, here comes Fix95, then evolved into Fix32 when in the following years Microsoft released the first versions of the 32bit Windows operating system.

The 90s, finally Ethernet in the factory

Until the mid-90s, the large automation and control system vendors thought of "blocking" customers' choices by offering them "proprietary" systems: those who chose a certain brand also made field and technology choices that kept it tied to that Brand for the rest of the life (of the plant)…

However, the new Information Technology technologies have shuffled the cards: the advent of Windows, which could be used on any PC and Server hardware of any brand, as long as it is based on Intel microprocessors (hence the acronym Wintel) together with the diffusion of ethernet as a simplified connection and cabling system in the office which allowed data and information to travel on the nascent Internet Protocol (hence the initials IP) have allowed a multitude of independent vendors to appear on the market and propose innovations and new products which have determined a sort of “liberalization”, even in industrial applications.

Starting from the second half of the 90s, the "old" and slow industrial protocols, which traveled on serial buses, were converted to go on the "new" industrial networks based on Ethernet, with an increase in performance that multiplied the fields of application. It was then that the first version of OPC was born as a field communication standard, then evolved over the years to the current and reliable OPC-UA.

The 90s, the vintage of Automation

In the history of industrial automation, nothing has ever happened fast. In fact we are talking about evolution, and in those 90s we saw several that had an impact and still influence today's industrial production. For 10 years, in fact since 2012 we have been talking about Industry 4.0, as an evolution of that Industry 3.0 that we experienced in the last decades of the 1900s. Those of us who were there (…how old I feel with this phrase!) know that the The years between 1992 and the end of the century marked the end of an era and the beginning of the adoption of many technologies that had a great following in the following decades, as we have described above.

Even today, when we visit "dated" plants, we find traces of what was installed in those years: the first uses of digital technology which, sometimes without major updates, still works today and guarantees production and quality. And this is the demonstration that the choices made then by the colleagues who adopted those "innovations" were mostly right intuitions. Today, however, there is a theme that was not heard at all at the time, and which today instead worries production and operations managers a lot: IT risk, which today exposes plants and machinery with obsolete networks and systems to accidents that could undermine their operational continuity and safety itself with impacts on the integrity of people, the environment and the plants themselves. But let's talk about OT Cyber ​​Security another time…