Flashback a few decades to the days when this steel mill is getting an automation upgrade — which means for the first time there will be real-time tracking of the manufacturing process, according to a pilot fish on the project.

“Terminals were added to the various control areas within the mill to track the metal as it moved from ingot to coil,” says fish. “We also communicated with the corporate mainframe for key data, as well as certain process-control systems on the floor.

“We were running on MicroPDP-11 16-bit minicomputers where each process was limited to 64K, some of which was used for memory-mapped I/O or for sharing data between the individual programs in the system.”

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