Shawn Tierney shares an update on the Automation Museum fundraiser, as well as some information about the A-B 1750-PMC Programmable Matrix Controller. For information about donating to the Automation Museum, please click here.

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Shawn Tierney (Host): So for an automation museum update, we’re about a and I don’t talk about this a lot. I should talk about this more, but we’re at about 7% of our goal, which is great because we started at zero as you might have met remember. And so I just wanna thank some of these people you may recognize from, from over on LinkedIn. Larry. I wanna thank Larry for his donation.

Ryan for his donation. Lassie and Brandon, thank you all for supporting it. I’m I’m at the bottom of the list too. I was the first because I launched it. I supported it first.

I also donated the automationmuseum.org, which takes you here and, the automationmuseum.com as well to that site. That was about $35 to get those two, set up. And, what this is with the fundraising goal, there’s the tier one, the $3,000. This is just to get the, the nonprofit set up and the, website set up. So I’m not gonna build the website.

I’ve I spent all my time building the automation school and blog and managing that. I would like, someday, I’m gonna outsource that as well. But I I just want somebody to build a basic website we can build on, and we need that, I think it’s a five zero one three c so we can accept, you know, donations, and and actually, make them nonprofit. So they are, they are tax deductible. Right?

So in any case, I wanted to share that with you. So 7% of our goal, that’s great. And, you know, last time when I was talking about the automation museum, I was talking about the PLC five. So today, and thanks for, Ryan, who is, is our top donor so far, he mentioned something called the seventeen fifty PMC from Rockwell Automation. Now if you don’t know, that’s one of Rockwell’s earliest PLCs they have ever made.

I don’t know much about it. Matter of fact, you know, I didn’t get into this industry until 1990. So the old stuff then were PLC twos, PLC threes, 1330 threes, 1330 fives. That was kinda like the legacy stuff. And the new stuff was the PLC five and the slick 500 just coming out at that time.

And a few years later, the MicroLogic. So, so in any case, that that’s kinda when I started. So I didn’t get to work on, any of the, you know, original, you know, early seventies stuff. Right? So I was, I was just a baby, just a baby in the early seventies or a toddler.

But in any case, let me bring you back to here and let’s take a look. Now the first official PLC, I wrote a nice article about well, I shouldn’t say I wrote a nice article. I wrote an article about this over at the automation blog. You determine if it’s nice or not. But in any case, I had the opportunity in my previous role of twenty five years being a certified automation specialist for a Rockwell distributor.

I had the opportunity to scan in a bunch of those early documents. Right? So, and if anybody’s thrown away all their old early documents, send them to me, throw them my way. But I will take them in a donation and and, and then hand them over to the automation school, but I’m sorry. To the automation museum, where all that old stuff will go.

I do have, I don’t know, a storage unit full of stuff I wanna donate. It’s like all kinds of old books and manuals and brochures. But anything prior to, you know, go goes back too far. And I know, one of my libraries and one of my former employers got tossed, and and I just didn’t reach out soon enough to to ask them to donate it to the museum. But in any case, I did get the scan in some of the very first POC brochures that’s in that big blue binder that some of your distributors may may remember.

And if you guys have that and you’re thinking to throw it away, send it our way. We’ll we’ll preserve it in the school. Just think of I keep saying the school, the museum. Just think of all the things we we could display. But in any case, this article talks about the p d PDQ two.

You’re like you may be like, Shawn, p d q two, does that mean there was a p d q one? Yes. But Rockwell was only an investor in three I with the p d q one. They didn’t fully own, three I until the p d q two came out. And, you can even see I even include here some of the, design and manufactured by three I, serviced and sold by Allen Bradley.

So even at this time in 1970, they still had that they still didn’t wholly own three I. They did I think they bought them in ’71. But in any case, so this is not what Ryan was talking about. This is the first one. This one had some downsides.

It was still super interesting. If you wanna know more about it, check up here. But this was the first Allen Bradley product that used an XIC and an XIO. And, you know, some people say, well, Rockwell should use the standard that I you know, the I triple you know, IEC six eleven thirty one dash three standard. And it’s like, why?

The standard came out so far later than the actual than their PLCs. Why not keep it the same for their customers? So you can go either way on that. But in any case but and and thanks to Ryan for his lodge donation towards the Automation Museum, I wanted to pull up some of those old brochures and kinda show you what the $17.50 PMC was. I believe this was the direct next release after the PDQ two.

Okay. And you can see, actually, the program looks almost identical. Maybe it is identical. But you can kinda get a good look at it there. There’s no middle ground with this zoom.

Let me sling all over here and see if I can zoom out for a minute. Okay. So you can kinda get an idea of what it looks like here. And this I would love to have this in the, automation museum. Actually, find one of these, get it working, and maybe even have people come in and, like, do, a tutorial on it, kinda go over the history on it.

I just think this would be so much fun. And not just Allen Bradley, all the different vendors. But in any case, PMC stands for programmable matrix controller. But right on the front of the unit, it says programmable controller. So, not you know, the matrix may have referred to the solid state memory that they were using for the first time.

I don’t know. I’m gonna be honest with you. I did not read this complete thing cover to cover. I think it’s 12 or 14 pages before, this morning’s show. But in any case, you could see some of this here.

If you’re interested, you can pause. I do not have an article on this. I’d love to do one, though. But, in any case, it’s very, very similar to, you know, the the PDQ two and really, honestly, the PLCs we have today, but it’s just old. And, let me show you a couple more screens here.

And when I scan these, I made sure I scanned them high very, very, high details so that we could really zoom in on them. But in any case, so you can see the LOTA program on the top right, and then you can see the instructions. This is how you would code it. Again, you weren’t drawing it physically. You were typing it in kinda like how you would type in if you were editing a wrong in RS Logix with Studio 5,000, how you can go in there and type on it.

That’s how you would do it here. So, you can see X I C X I C B R T, that’s branch. Right? And then X I C X 0 E. Right?

That’s asking and and so the way you couldn’t do an x I c on an output, which is interesting. Right? Because now we can examine an output state, but they had separate instructions. They had the XOE to examine if an output was energized. And then here, they’re using a set.

Okay? So, I wonder if you need a reset. This old old the second man today, of course, you need a reset for it today. We call that latch and unlatch. Right?

And, yeah. So that this set yeah. This set, I’m just reading that quickly. It looks like it’s an OTE equivalent. So very interesting stuff there.

And then we come over here. This is a a kind of a picture of what it looks like. And I believe these made these programmers look so similar to the ones for the PDQ two, but you can see they’re programming an EPROM here and, putting in the memory board. Seventeen fifty. I can’t read that.

It looks like a BD. But in any case, just to give you an idea what it would look like. So we’d like to get one of these in the school. Yeah. And this I did it again.

In the museum. And, if we can if we can raise that money for the fundraiser, right, we can at least get the five zero one three c open. And what I wanna do is every week, I wanna cover some of the old stuff. I have, actually, four things queued up that people have sent in. I have one of those, device net meter thingies.

I have a PMCK card. I have a old old I think I’ve shown it on this on the on the, show before. I think it’s an old square d PLC demo case, which is really heavy and big, but it’s kicking around here under a table somewhere. And so every week, I’ll try to go over one of those with you to talk about the auto museum automation museum. And if you do have a couple of dollars extra and you wanna kick it towards it, we’d love to get this off the ground so it could be a nonprofit, and then we can go after some of the big guys to fund maybe exhibits in an actual building that you could visit.

So with that, I just wanna wish you guys all an awesome weekend and week ahead. I wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace.

Show Notes: Special thanks to everyone who already donated! You can see the current status of our fundraiser at:

• https://www.givesendgo.com/automationmuseum.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

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Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.