In the category of curious press releases, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms (that's the company name, now) sent a release proclaiming the 5th Anniversary of the Programmable Automation Controller, a category that it claims to have started. As in many genealogies, this one is hard to trace with certainty. Rockwell Automation's ControlLogix platform is arguably a PAC, and I believe it was out at least by 2002. National Instruments and Opto 22 (alphabetical, not chronological, order) also arguably had PACs before either of the other two companies.
The reason I say "arguably" is that the term was coined by Craig Resnick, an analyst at ARC Advisory Group in 2002. However, not knowing my place in the analyst/editor solar system, I was attempting to push a similar name change through my writings at Control Engineering as early as 2000 when I saw the adoption of various mainstream computing ideas into manufacturing control platforms.
At any rate, GE's Bill Estep says that the PACsystems platform is going well for his company on this, the fifth anniversary of its unveiling. That's good. Some of the crucial ideas were a single software development platform from which control programs can be deployed to different hardware platforms and a single platform for various types of control, for example logic and motion. In my conversations with engineers, I gather that they agree that it's been good for them, too.
4:18:45 PM 
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