Interview with Stefan Schönegger, B&R"There will be no either-or"
The programmable logic controller - PLC for short - has been around for 55 years. How has the controller changed since then and where will it go from here? Stefan Schönegger, responsible for the Controls division at B&R, provides an outlook in this interview.
Meinrad Happacher, Senior Advisory Editor of Computer&Automation
"It's just getting started!"
"Computer" - with this element in our magazine name in 1998, we wanted to take account of the IT influence in automation technology that was already emerging at the time. However, the expected IT influence took much longer than we expected at the time. For a very long time, the industry persisted in preserving its sinecure and got bogged down in sideshows such as the fieldbus war. While pioneers had paved the way for computers in industrial control technology quite early on - such as Hans Beckhoff in 1986 with his first PC-based machine controller - the widespread introduction of the associated IT technologies was a long time coming.