A minor Adventure in Vintage Computing

[Brent Hilpert]

Carlos Murillo-Sanchez wrote:
> 
> Foxboro was a british industrial instruments company with a very long
> history.  Among other achievements, they were the first to offer a pneumatic
> process controller with proportional+integral action (pneumatic controllers
> in those days were on/off or at most proportional).  It was called
> the "Stabilog",  and it was introduced in 1930; it followed the introduction
> of the negative-feedback pneumatic amplifier designed by Clesson E. Mason
> (also at Foxboro) in 1929 to linearize the action of pneumatic-actuated
> flow-control valves.  This started the era of pneumatic-based analog
> computation in process control equipment (on topic).  I remember
> seeing a brochure from those days, trying to lure control practitioners
> to install "modern pneumatic process control equipment: imagine your
> plant with pneumatic instrumentation so you can control it with signals
> that move at the speed of sound" :-) .  This may seem funny nowadays,
> but it was really this kind of technology that allowed the feasibility
> of _really big_ refineries, fertilizer plants and so on.  Electronic
> controls in industrial settings were still a few decades from commercial
> success.

Thanks for the writeup, a little enlightenment about an area that isn't normally
covered in computing history.


> The first instance of closed-loop control using a digital computer
> in an industrial setting supposedly happened at a Texaco refinery
> in Port Arthur in March 15, 1959, using an RW-300 computer
> (does anybode have a good reference on this?).

 I have a (vague) recollection of seeing an article in the IEEE
"Annals of the History of Computing" publication that mentioned this.
A search for Port Arthur found the following link to the table of contents for
the Spring 1995 issue:

 http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/an/&toc=comp/mags/an/1995/01/a1toc.xml

which contains an article titled "Pioneering Work in the Field of Computer
Process Control".
I can't view the entire article online, so I'm not sure if it is the article I
recall or not
(.. saw it several years ago in the paper version).