The Birth of SCADA

DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), Office of Science [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

To understand the origins of SCADA, we must understand the problems industrial organizations are trying to solve. Before the concept of SCADA was introduced in the mid-20th century, many manufacturing floors, industrial plants, and remote sites relied on personnel to manually control and monitor equipment via push buttons and analog dials.

As industrial floors and remotes site began to scale out in size, solutions were needed to control equipment over long distances. Industrial organizations started to utilize relays and timers to provide some level of supervisory control without having to send people to remote locations to interact with each device.

While relays and timers solved many problems by providing limited automation functionality, more issues began to arise as organizations continued to scale out. Relays and timers were difficult to reconfigure, fault-find and the control panels took up racks upon racks of space. A more efficient and fully automated system of control and monitoring was needed.

In the early 1950s, computers were first developed and used for industrial control purposes. Supervisory control began to become popular among the major utilities, oil and gas pipelines, and other industrial markets at that time. In the 1960s, telemetry was established for monitoring, which allowed for automated communications to transmit measurements and other data from remotes sites to monitoring equipment. The term “SCADA” was coined in the early 1970s, and the rise of microprocessors and PLCs during that decade increased enterprises’ ability to monitor and control automated processes more than ever before.