Brief history of SCADA

The acronym SCADA stands for "Supervisor Control And Data Acquisition", to give meaning to the acronym SCADA can be thought of as a distributed computer system, whose constituent components are hardware and software, the primary purposes are: monitoring, control and supervision of industrial systems processes.

SCADA systems were born in the 1960s with the aim of controlling industrial sites that grew in size and complexity. In those years it was necessary to provide a technology capable of controlling and monitoring physical systems efficiently and automatically even in the presence of distributed controls located over large distances.

The introduction of SCADA in process control allowed operators (and technicians) to limit manual actions on local commands (example: act on buttons, switches, physical selectors) introducing the possibility to remotely command and control even very large processes, away from the command seat. 

SCADA was the reference technology to keep processes under control even remotely, reduce costs (no staff is needed on site) and increase safety (in critical environments the absence of personnel allows to reduce risks for people, and continuous control to reduce risks to the environment).

The heart of the SCADA is the software part, which has allowed the continuous evolution thanks to communication technologies, data acquisition and interface development.

SCADA has spanned the decades adapting to the increasingly pressing needs of control and monitoring. It has been able to update itself by introducing appropriate tools that have made it possible to improve the appearance and graphic representation of processes also to facilitate the development of the user interface (aka UI).

If you are curious about the evolution of SCADA follow my blog, with pleasure I inform you that there is also my book (currently written in Italian) Smart SCADA.