I left the company in '87 and lost contact with them years ago. The system was 8085 based, ran a preemptive RTOS written in PL/M and assembler derived from RMX-86. The network was optically isolated RS-485 9600 baud. It was configured using Template Block programming, where the blocks acted like little HP RPN calculators that were linked together to build a control sequence. Its primary distinction was its ability to do user generated "direct digital control logic". The OS fit in 32k.
Barber Colman OEM'd the main logic board from Control Pak and put them in their own box.
Barber Colman's QC engineers were hard core SOB's and they put that system through the wringer, trying to break it in a million ways. They had a special smile when they had found another bug or a screw terminal they could zap with a spark generator and lock the system up. They were unhappy when they could not break it anymore. That's why there are still some Supervisors running today. They are tough as nails. I owe those guys a lot.
Late 70's. I wrote the operating system for the Control Pak EM system sold as the Barber Colman Network Supervisor building automation system. Thousands of systems were installed and many are still in use. By cracky. Er, what was the question again?
Was that the 8052-AH Basic one? (Funny I still remember the numbers). I worked for a place where I built a commercial system using that. We used it for a couple of things, a nurse call system, a datalogger, just GP IO, was a great time.
Some of those were more 80s, weren't they? I remember RA81s and VMS microfiches from '89, and even then at a company that was deliberately providing legacy support.
I commissioned and programmed pdp11/83 based systems used for process control and operator interface systems in a steelworks as "recently" as 1989. I wouldn't be surprised if they were still running...
SICK LMS 2xx. Weakest link was the java microcontrollers we had to use because we were majority funded by SUN. My favorite part was the old elevator relays we found in a junkyard and used for a bunch of the control system. You could hear the car 'thinking' and know what it was about to do.
I worked for NBCU and used to manage 3.3 3.54, 3.23, and about 5 other 3.x /16s. We had some design policies created by an elderly architect that was a bit lazy, so instead of VLSM for point to point links we would use /24s. Ahhh, the good old days.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane… thinking about the long ethernet cable also jogged my memory of the problematic position wifi on laptops had with linux around that time. That and running a box fan under my Gateway laptop in order to make it thru the Linux installer long enough to hack on enabling ACPI thermal management. I think Lindows worked out of the box for that too.
I would love to hear the technical details on this one... Systems like these tend to be so old and unmaintained, I can't understand why it would need to be hooked up to the network instead of being a big red button in an office somewhere and learning how it was owned might let me work that bit out :)
We had a couple of these at my old job. Really neat stuff. At least at the time they shipped you new ones when they came out. They also had a 56k modem on them so that they could dial into the serial console to debug them. This is a really neat business model that seemed to work well in that case.
Hehee, my dad ended up buying some demo/test machine from AST in 92 or so. The comp had quite high end specs for it's time. It actually ran really fine for long time because of switching to Linux. Stopped using it in 1998. Probably could still remember all the IO, DMA, IRQ settings for hardware ^___^
Same here, RS-170 into Cognex MVS8100 ca. 20 years ago. Their pattern matching was gold standard at the time. We also used Matrox but I was a Cognex man at that time. Some of those systems are still running today but I do not miss the days of analog video one bit.
I worked with AS/400s. Very fond memories of changing the backup tapes, in particular. I loved the server room! Meanwhile on the software side I was mostly dealing with EDI messages and it was all about critically precise placement of characters (including whitespace). It was ... weird. Nice machines though. The whole company's back office systems for around 300 shops ran on two of them in head office. Ah nostalgia...
A long time ago I bought a serial terminal and a whole bunch of serial cables from them. Along with a Cisco PIX. I still have all of that somewhere in my garage.
Wow, I spent two years looking after a PDP 11/23 running RTS/E. Interesting times... In that I've never met anyone less than 20 years older that understands what I've done (and to be fair most of those older than that have an aamazing understanding compared to me), I found it amazing that between the PDP and AS/400 box at work that they were bought by people that retired a long time ago and still ran, not that the data coming out was accurate. I think the rest of my employer's place was like that, and perhaps that was part of the problem.
i actually liked working with rs232 back in the early 80s. give me my trusty breakout box, a soldering iron, my own hand-crafted terminal emulator and i was happy as larry. it was really hard to do anything destructively wrong - at worst the thing just wouldn't work. certainly a lot easier to deal with than things are today, should something go wrong.
Barber Colman OEM'd the main logic board from Control Pak and put them in their own box.
Barber Colman's QC engineers were hard core SOB's and they put that system through the wringer, trying to break it in a million ways. They had a special smile when they had found another bug or a screw terminal they could zap with a spark generator and lock the system up. They were unhappy when they could not break it anymore. That's why there are still some Supervisors running today. They are tough as nails. I owe those guys a lot.
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