What is the oldest PLC system you have running?

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.

And charged a very high rate to do so.
 
Hi Sparkies

What about the Automate 35 from Reliance & the Hazeltine 1500 terminal?are they still around?

Ceers
 
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.

Ehhh... 9/Series? Oh God... :)
 
GE Fanuc Series One

It was the oldest, it finally died last week. It started loosing its program off and on, and we actually had the original program tape and tape player with cables.

Next oldest is a GE Fanuc Series One Junior

I’ll kind of miss programming that plc. It was always fun to skip down the aisle with a tape player and user manual tucked up under my arm. It would always get questions and confused looks. “Your going to program a PLC, with..whatever that is..?” Yes, it’s called a tape player. While not sitting in your room waiting for that one song to come on the radio, and triple checking that you got the tape ready so that you don’t record over any other songs, you can program PLCs with it.
 
pics dont show up unfortunately, were they of the tape player ?

That’s weird. I can’t edit it either.
Yeah it was a pic of the plc and another pic of the programming spread. Plc in the cabinet, tape player, tape, and user manual. Lol

t7bcxv.jpg
 
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what era is that GE series 1 ?



i don't think these things were ever marketed in Oz to my knowledge. early 80's was flooded with all the Jap branded PLC's (hitachi, national, mitsubishi, Omron etc) Bradley, siemens and Modicons i even saw some festo (re badged omron's). my first PLC course was in 1988 on PLC 2's and Square D back then i was impressed with the square D as its addressing stucture was much simpler than the octal based PLC2.



funny i still remember plc2 counters and timers data tables was 030 -> 077 with their preset values at 130 -> 177.
 
And here I used to complain about programming my old Modicon Quatum 534's. Immediate changes if editing online and a buggy third party editor.

I can't even imagine the horrors of having to use a tape. Did you edit the code in the PLC and just back it up to the tape, or did you enter it onto the tape and then load it in And hope you had everything as expected?

We really have come a long way.
 
Way back, I have experience with some pretty rarely used PLCs.
Like Festo FPC, S5-110, AEG (with AEG software, not Modicon software), SattCon 100, in addition to the more typical S5-100, -115, -135, AB PLC5, AB SLC500 etc.
The strangest thing was a control system made out of logic blocks (kinda like Lego blocks) with each block having an OR-gate, an AND-gate, or a timer. A nightmare to troubleshoot !

Today I deal in upgrading old relay controls, and S5-95, S5-115 and B&R 2005 to S7-1500.
 
The GE Series One was branded by GE from 1982 to roughly 1988. It was (and still is) made by Koyo Electronics.

The program was entered into the PLC via a pushbutton programming deck mounted to the front of the PLC. The program was then transferred to the cassette player via the same pushbutton deck.

The PLC was rebranded by Texas Instruments (late 80's) and Siemens (early 90's) before transferring to AutomationDirect as the DirectLogic 305 Series around 1994.

ADC still sells the majority of the parts for them.
 
The GE Series One was branded by GE from 1982 to roughly 1988. It was (and still is) made by Koyo Electronics.

The program was entered into the PLC via a pushbutton programming deck mounted to the front of the PLC. The program was then transferred to the cassette player via the same pushbutton deck.

The PLC was rebranded by Texas Instruments (late 80's) and Siemens (early 90's) before transferring to AutomationDirect as the DirectLogic 305 Series around 1994.

ADC still sells the majority of the parts for them.

But don’t expect to buy a Directlogic PLC and swap out a GE Series One.
It won’t even power up. I’m guessing that the rack is different.

Here is the programmer.

okpto4.jpg
 

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