All,

I was cleaning out the basement storage last night and re-discovered an issue of Plant Engineering from October 1984. No, I'm not that old. It was given to me.

Reading through it I saw an advert for ControlNet by Siemens-Allis Automation Inc. This is from 1984!!!!! The photo shows coax cables and the verbage mentions "token access bus for true distributed control".

It sounds familiar. Did AB buy ControlNet from Siemens? If so, does this mean that it is almost 20 years old?????

Anthony Kerstens P.Eng.

 

I wish I had time to do this topic justice. Here are a few notes from Serial Networked Field Instrumentation, J.R. Jordan, Wiley 1995

1955 4-20 mA instrumentation
1969 RS-422/423 serial interface
1971 IEC TC-65 4-20 mA is international standard
1975 Ethernet
1980 G.M. factory automation working group
1983 ISO 7498 Open System Inerconnect ref. model
1984 IEEE Medical Information Bus (MIB)
1985 IEC TC 65C/WG6 fieldbus working group
1985 IEEE 802 series standards started
1987 Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP)

>From the mid 60's on, various countries, militaries, standards bodies, and industries have developed different serial communication models and implementations. The high energy physists had theirs, the medical instrument makers theirs, etc. All of which won't interconnect. The development stories and technical definitions fill up this whole book.

For process control, it looks like the Honeywell TDC-2000 in 1975 gets credit for the first large distributed system. For "fieldbus", it looks like everyone got going in the mid-80's. The French had the Factory Instrumentation Protocal project (FIP), Germans had PROFIBUS, and proprietary systems Arcnet-Datapoint Corp, Echelon LonWorks, Controller Area Network (CAN)-Bosch, Bitbus-IBM, MODBUS-Gould/Modicon.

Long way around to the original question - this reference doesn't mention ControlNet! Neither does Liptak. Looks like the concepts have been around since the 60's, but each standard and proprietary implementation has had a life of its own.

Perhaps someone with a great memory will add to this.

Brian Lee Mast, P.E.
Trippel/Mast Consulting LLC
Seattle, Washington
(206) 652-8485
[email protected]