What is the oldest PLC system you have running?

I would guess that about 10% of my cables are for legacy equipment that are obsolete, I still sell about 5 cables a week for SLC100/150's and ship them all around the world
The GE Charlottesville plant didn't bother with legacy stuff. When they considered Series 6 was a done deal they just threw a while bunch of cables in their dumpster.
 
The GE Charlottesville plant didn't bother with legacy stuff. When they considered Series 6 was a done deal they just threw a while bunch of cables in their dumpster.

I think GE has rethought that philosophy in recent years. When a line goes obsolete they now sell it off, such as Cimtec Automation now owning the remaining stock of 90/70 and maybe even 90/30. I've seen the remaining new stock of 90/70 stuff GE sold off, it fits nicely on a single shelf.
 
I worked for the Las Vegas Valley Water District for 11 years as an industrial electrician/PLC programmer. They were running some modicons at the treatment plant on Lake Mead, and at the district we had all PLC 5 with a few SLC 100's and 150's running air compressors. I started in 2000. In '08 we started migrating to control logix because the Bristol-Babcock processors in the RTU's at the sites would no longer be made or supported so we needed a PLC that could communicate with the SCADA radio interface via ethernet. Flash forward to 2017 I worked for a while at a cement plant here in Detroit and we had a PLC-3 still working complete with the tape drive. We used it for a lab and had a lot of fun. PLC 5 all over that plant, too.
 
that philosophy in recent years.

Its all about the current management (back at my last job) we bought a company that made the same product as us they had 6 plants unclad laminates (printed circuit boards) one of the manufacturing plants was about 60 miles from us... after the sale, I was told to drive up there get what I wanted and make sure that none of the equipment would ever run again, I pulled all the PLC's, they later had a scrap metal company come in and cut it all up, 4 of their treaters were over 6 stories tall, guessing they were worth a few mill each

The same thing happened when I worked for IP and they closed the plant, they did not want to sell the equipment so anything that another plants did not want they cut up into little pieces, it took over a year but we cut up a few large printing presses

The money waisted....
 
Its all about the current management (back at my last job) we bought a company that made the same product as us they had 6 plants unclad laminates (printed circuit boards) one of the manufacturing plants was about 60 miles from us... after the sale, I was told to drive up there get what I wanted and make sure that none of the equipment would ever run again, I pulled all the PLC's, they later had a scrap metal company come in and cut it all up, 4 of their treaters were over 6 stories tall, guessing they were worth a few mill each

The same thing happened when I worked for IP and they closed the plant, they did not want to sell the equipment so anything that another plants did not want they cut up into little pieces, it took over a year but we cut up a few large printing presses

The money waisted....

forced obsolescence much?
 
And we still have a few Wonderware SCADA running on Windows NT..

Twas only in late 2016 that we ditched 2 of our DOS SCADAs

Reckon my 250MB Parallel Iomega Zip Drive can be retired (again) soon when the NT PCs go at the shutdown next week...may even be able to do the same to the floppy drives...

Although we do still have a Siemens Coros PC (config 1998) running a SCADA for the boiler - the PSU crashed earlier this year, and we realised then why it was still there- the InTouch system could not deal with every function for the S5 Profibus controllers...so had to find a replacement PSU for a 1998 PC...
 
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We have one of these, I don't even know what it is...
Edit: Looks like .jpg failed to upload. It's an AB mini-plc 2/02.
 
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The plant I left a year ago has an Idec FA2jr still running in a machine. The place I work now has a lot of S5. We are slowly replacing them.
I started up my last Idec FA2J project in May, 1995 for a waste water treatment plant, with one PLC on the raw sewage pump station and a second on the aeration blowers. In 2010 I got a call asking if I remembered the protected setpoint password for the aeration HMI (actually a very cheap message display the took about 700 words of ladder to be usable). The whole system, including four AC Tech dL100 VFDs, had been so trouble free for years that they never touched it. The password was to connect Input 23 to +24vdc power. I've heard that the system will be replaced as part of a major plant renovation this year.

Now for the truly obscure! Has anyone ever seen, never mind recently either of these:
1) A Sylvania PLC, programmed in SYBIL (SYlvaania Basic Instruction Language) using a rebranded Kaypro II CP/M portable. At my first job in 1986, they used these to build natural gas odorizer controls for the local utility.

2) A Zorba portable computer with the 8088 coprocessor board running CPM/86 and UP/DOC PLC programming software. We used this and an A-B T3 terminal to program PLC-2s before the ICOM software and 1784-KT card came along for the PC.


Mike
 
Currently, the oldest stuff are GE 90-30 and maybe some brick SLC hidding somewhere.

However, one of the DCS I worked with 20 years ago was a Foxboro 1 DCS with punchcard, disk-stack, and teletype.
 
About 8 years ago I had a customer with a Mini PLC-2/05 come and ask me to re-load their program, which they had on diskette.

I dug around and asked some questions and built a computer that I was pretty sure could read the disks and load them via a 1784-PCMK and -PCM2 cable.

When I arrived, they looked at my PC quizzically. "What are you going to do with that ? We use this !", and they rolled out a cart with an Apple II on it.

Turns out that a machine tool company in Portland, Oregon built a PLC-2 loader utility for the Apple II in 1978. Nobody still working at Rockwell had ever heard of it.

Good think I worked for Apple as a teenager, and recognized the serial boards and remembered just enough of the OS to get that thing booted, carefully load the program, and get it into Run mode.

The bad thing is that the backup program was several hardware/electrical revisions old. We ended up re-typing the printout, guessing at what which pencil notes were applicable.
 
this is a cool thread.



when i first started in the plant i now work (this was 1991) there was still multiple PLC2's in service with 1777 4 point I/O cards, one area had a Allen Bradley programming terminal that "pre dated" the CRT Industrial terminals used for programming (you know the type "Search 99" commands and the like). this terminal (guessing 1978/9 era when plant was commissioned) allowed you to view one address only.

i can only imagine trying to commission fault find with something like that.
 
To my knowledge, a place I worked at years ago is still using some 5TI sequencers on various assembly machines. The programs and instruction addresses were all documented on paper. The program section for each station of the machine started at a round number with NOPs filling the gaps between sections. The insert button of the programmer was removed with a cap taped over the switch because if you hit insert, it would shift the remainder of the program up one address. The delete button didn’t shift the remainder back. It only wrote a NOP. If we made a change, we would re-enter the rest of that section so the rest of the program would stay at the documented addresses. I saw one at another place years later and they had the insert button removed and capped too.
 
Nowadays you'd probably have to convert S6 to 90/30 or 90/70, then convert it again to RX3i. I'll have to push that site to budget for an upgrade, its pretty ridiculous.

I've done more S6 work and conversions than I care to remember and that's exactly how you would have to do it.

The S6 conversion software is at most about 80% accurate unless the S6 program contains a lot of math or analogs, then the accuracy drops dramatically.

If someone comes to me today and wants a conversion quoted, I basically start with a blank sheet of paper. Most times a complete rewrite can happen just as efficiently as a conversion.
 
I have 1 client with 3 SLC150 running every day he will not upgrade until they fail and he loses production.
another running an AB9300 CNC
Others running PLC 2/ 2/16 2/17 2/30

About 10 years ago, I used to do a bunch of work at the (3) Chrysler Transmission plants in Kokomo IN and one of the plants had several of the A-B CNCs on large machines. Anyone that was trained to maintain them had long since retired and A-B couldn't provide support either. Last I looked there was someone on the east coast repairing them.

I feigned ignorance even though I had installed several in the early 80s. Probably could have made a career right there keeping those machines running.
 

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