What is the oldest PLC system you have running?

We still have 2 or 3 TI 510's, installed in the very early 1980's.
Anyone remember the TI VPU with the VIM to connect?
 
We've just finished building a new treatment plant which has made this chlorine injection station obsolete... the controls had been built by an ex university professor 30 years ago on veroboard using CMOS gates and op amps etc. No drawings existed. Beautifully tidy work, and was still operating fine.

Other than that a few Modicon quauntum 984 racks from mid 90s. All but one upgraded to Unity firmware now, one replaced with an M580 hot standby. Still going strong.
 
Just decommissioned our last Klockner Moeller PS3 PLC system last year, converted to ControlLogix...lots of KM spares now.......

plenty of 1771-PLC5 systems still running here on Remote I/O, as we upgrade to CLX and Ethernet, we generate our own spares of 1794-ASB units

Even have a couple of 1771-AF modules with a fibre running over a great distance....nobody wants to go to the top station because they get divebombed by the birds nesting there....
 
about 12 years ago i pulled out a custom made Zilog Z80 batching controller written with assembly language that interfaced with an original PLC2 with 1777 4 point I/o TTL cards. the Zilog Z80 was also connected to toledo weigh system that used BCD and had a mix of DTL & TTL logic.



system was installed in 1979. it was still running fine at the time.
 
Almost forgot about our 1771 co-processor module in one of our glue processes...
We have a spare module and the "program" to load the configuration to it, after getting instructions from Hugh Pickard at Rockwell as to how to do it. The module has required reset a couple of times recently.
At the time I spoke to Hugh, he said there were 2 people left at Rockwell who knew about this module. Hugh has since retired...........

I spoke to the supplier of the system, who admitted that the spare module will only be useful if we can take out the memory chips of the running system's module. They had to upgrade these to get enough memory to run the program.

I have requested an upgrade..........awaiting approval...
 
There's a lot of old machines out there..

I've seen these still in use:
Modicon C484
ABB MasterPiece 200
Siemens Teleperm M
Sattcon 05-10
 
A bit OT. The PLC of its time for sequence programming was a Cam Timer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_timer
I had a call 6 years ago about one I used in the very early 80s in a brewery, it was controlling a Candle Filter, still chugging along. Nobody on site knew what it did but they found one of our labels in the box and were happy to be able to get drawings and a timing sequence chart.
 
Every year on a companies annual 2 week shutdown I replace the output boards on a Toshiba EX 200 and all its extension boards.
I then desolder all the old relays and replace them with new ones.
They then have newly refurbished boards to go straight in if any go in the meantime.

They will not hear of upgrading to a new PLC.
 
I visit a site where they have a 1756-L1 processor, connected to a SCADA computer that is running RSview (can't remember exactly which version). The computer has windows 2000 as the operating system, which pre-dates Windows XP.

I think that it was installed around 1998. The PLC has version 8 firmware, and the PC also has RSLogix 5000 version 8 installed on it, so I can see the program file ok (for now), however this version cannot be installed on a new computer - and I don't want to risk a firmware upgrade.

When you how see how important this system is to production, it is amazing that it hasn't yet been upgraded.
 
And then today I went to a site to check on a Twido PLC that was installed in 2007 - I have also found out that the Real Time Clock module for the Twido is no longer available - and the clock is vital to the job that this PLC is doing - so we will be quoting to replace this system soon.

I guess 11 years is a good run for a cheap PLC like a Twido:confused:
 
I am responsible for an old plant that we use their CA buildings for storage. It has an old CH30 Omron with 4 remote racks. All in all about 25-30 cards. It runs 5 glycol units and a floor temperature control system, it runs another 5 compressor system for 2 massive controlled atmosphere buildings as well as 2, 200HP ammonia compressors for blast freezers. All controlled by one, very old XP machine running what IM sure is a shady version of RSV32.
Iv had troubles with this system over the years. Loosing com cards, power supplies and such. Parts are extremely hard to get and I or they have 0 spares for anything.
Iv been preaching to them for years to get something started and not to wait until D-Day because that day, I don't want to hear about it. Its always a scramble when this goes down as millions of dollars of product are at risk. I can't believe they won't bite the bullet and upgrade. They just think I can "make it work" every time!
Worst part is, I have their backups, ghosted XP machine and all as I used to work in this plant before it got de-commissioned, but should I really just hand it to them? They have no software, licenses or anything.
Iv already given it to them once and got it all up and running for them after they purchased the building from the old owner who stripped even the code from the PLC's and the RSV32 application from the PC and left the system unusable. I wasn't compensated even a bit for it. They have no idea how big of a deal it is to just be handed a working project to start up a de-commissioned refrigeration system of this size.

Would you give it to them?

Its time to upgrade!!!!!
 
About 3 years ago a kiln that I installed in 1987 was switched off the last time. It had a Hitachi E series PLC programmed with this keyboard

May he rest in peace :)

Its funny when we change out out old projects, I remember cutting up a old machine I made... took a couple months making it but about 30 sec with that plasma cutter, it was only in production about 6 months

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
 
We have a bunch of test machines here with Automation Direct 305 PLCs and 340 CPUs still running. Most of those were installed some time in the '90s and there is a blend of GE, Siemens, TI, and A/D parts that all work together. I picked up one of the spare GE modules we have and the date code on that one was from the late '80s, I believe. We also have some newer machines with 350 CPUs.

Sad that A/D is phasing them out after all these years. That has to be one of the longest production runs for a PLC platform to be in continuous production.
 

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