BPI - Johannesburg, South Africa
[1985 - 1989] continued...

BPI also developed and supported the larger scale ELCON SCADA package, operating on DEC PDP11 series mini-computers under RSX11M-Plus. The software was mostly written in RTL/2 with some encapsulated PDP11 Macro assembler code and was developed internally, by BPI, between 1981 and 1989. The development team comprised of Abel Acuna, Peter Moffat, Kobus Oosthuizen, Neil Gaynor, Ludwik Tomalak, Phillip Delcroix, Andre Kuzner, Ian Read, Peter Tandy, Stan Komar, Steve MacKenzie, Paul Tennant, Dr. Rob Clarkson and Tedy Shalev (myself).

My involvement was chiefly in three areas: as Team Leader and member of the same team, in the FEP - Front End Communication Co-processor project and as sole developer of the Alarm Annunciator and the FEP Comms QZ11 driver retrofit.

Front End Communication Co-processor
The control devices traditionally connected to SCADA systems mostly used either asynchronous or synchronous serial communication. A the serial I/O devices for PDP11 that were available at the time did not provide much buffering on board and all required CPU service on input interrupt, system performance was critically affected by high traffic volumes at high baud rates. In order to offload this activity, a project was initiated to move the serial communication required by the system into a Front-end Communications Co-processor or FEP for short. The specification called for diskless PDP11 satellite FEPs networked back to multiple host stations on a Positronika TechLAN network. This project proceeded timeously and no problems have been experienced in the field as a result of software faults subsequent to the release of the final approved version.

The Prospecton Breweries - ELCON with FEPs installation - Durban, South Africa