A brief history of Rockwell Automation

This book begins with some background history on the Rockwell Automation ecosystem. It is important to understand the legacy systems provided by Rockwell Automation because some of them can still be found operating in the field today. Also, it is important to understand the overall Rockwell Automation offering and terminology, and how the platforms we focus on in the book fit into the real world.

Allen-Bradley was founded in 1904 by brothers, Harry (19 years old) and Lynde Bradley (26 years old), with seed money from Dr. Stanton Allen. As a teenager, Lynde Bradley developed the prototype for what would later become Allen-Bradley's first commercial product. The primary focus of Allen-Bradley was motor controllers for several decades until they received an unusual challenge from General Motors (GM) in 1968. Each time GM wanted to introduce a new car, they needed to spend two or three months rewiring all their relays to support the production process changes. The request was to build a system to replace their hard-wired relay logic with something more dynamic—Standard Machine Controller. Modicon ultimately won the GM contract with their highly robust Modicon 084 Controller. As a result, Allen-Bradley acquired a company called Information Instruments Inc and produced their first functional controller—Programmable Matrix Controller (PMC) in 1971. Shortly after the release of PMC, Allen-Bradley released a more feature-rich product known as Programmable Logic Controller 1 (PLC-1). Since the introduction of the first Allen-Bradley (later, Rockwell Automation) PLC-1, we have seen several platforms released, including PLC-2 (1978), PLC-3 (1981), PLC-5 (1986), SLC 500 (1991), MicroLogix (1994), ControlLogix (1997), and finally, CompactLogix (2006). In 1985, Allen-Bradley was acquired by Rockwell International and was later spun off as a part of Rockwell Automation. In the field today, the Allen-Bradley name and logo can still be seen on many of the Rockwell Automation's products. The focus of this book will be on the modern ControlLogix and CompactLogix controllers and Studio 5000 Automation Engineering and Design Environment, which I will refer to as the Logix family.