Happy birthday PLC!

According to Control Engineering, the programmable logic controller is 40 years old. We should celebrate, because without it how would we make machine vision actually work? I suppose we could have the PC handle all the I/O – that will work in very simple applications but it rapidly becomes overloaded. In any case, the PC isn’t very good at operating in a deterministic manner. In other words, it carries out a task when it gets around to it, much like my teenage daughter. The PLC is a whole lot sharper; like an obedient soldier, when it receives a command, it gets the job done right then.

So we vision folk should be thankful to Dick Morley and his colleagues who put together the Model 084 for General Motors. Without their efforts it would be a whole lot harder to put machine vision to work.