50 Years of Industrial Automation [History]

Richard E. "Dick" Morley and George Schwenk founded Bedford Associates in Bedford, Massachuset ts, as a control systems engineering company in 1964. their main customers were New England-area machine tool builders who relied on them to provide minicomputer controls. Programming and debugging these minicomputer controls typically took six months to get the systems started, frustrating engineers and customers alike. Morley envisioned a more simplistic approach to solve this problem, utilizing advancements in solid-state electronics, computers, and digital signal processing. On 1 January 1968, he led his team of Tom Boissevain, Jonas Landau, and Mike Greenberg in developing a new programmable controller (PC) using ladder logic for programming. To speed up the scan time of the program, parallel processing was employed, reducing the software programming installation time from six months to six days [1].