Home Encyclopedia Of Opc History

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 18, 2025, 1:58 PM

In the summer of 1936, the Rev. John Davies and his pregnant wife, Hermina, camped for two weeks in an Dr. Bryan D. Estelle is an Orthodox Presbyterian Church minister who serves as professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary In the summer of 1936, the Rev.

John Davies and his pregnant wife, Hermina, camped for two weeks in an Dr. Bryan D. Estelle is an Orthodox Presbyterian Church minister who serves as professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary Mary Cummings was born in ChaiRyung, Korea as the youngest child of Missionary William F. Hunt and his second wife,

Open Platform Communications (OPC) is a series of standards and specifications for industrial telecommunication. They are based on Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for process control. An industrial automation task force developed the original standard in 1996 under the name OLE for Process Control. OPC specifies the communication of real-time plant data between control devices from different manufacturers. After the initial release in 1996, the OPC Foundation was created to maintain the standards.[1] Since OPC has been adopted beyond the field of process control, the OPC Foundation changed its name to Open... OPC has also grown beyond its original OLE implementation to include other data transportation technologies including Microsoft Corporation's .NET Framework, XML, and even the OPC Foundation's binary-encoded TCP format.

The OPC specification was based on the OLE, COM, and DCOM technologies developed by Microsoft Corporation for the Microsoft Windows operating system family. The specification defined a standard set of objects, interfaces e.g. IDL and methods for use in process control and manufacturing automation applications to facilitate interoperability. The most common OPC specification is OPC Data Access, which is used for reading and writing real-time data. When vendors refer to "OPC" generically, they typically mean OPC Data Access (OPC DA). OPC DA itself has gone through three major revisions since its inception.

Versions are backwards compatible, in that a version 3 OPC Server can still be accessed by a version 1 OPC Client, since the specifications add functionality, but still require the older version to be... However, a client could be written that does not support the older functions since everything can be done using the newer ones, thus a DA-3-compatible client will not necessarily work with a DA 1.0... In addition OPC DA specification, the OPC Foundation maintains the OPC Historical Data Access (HDA) specification. In contrast to the real time data that is accessible with OPC DA, OPC HDA allows access and retrieval of archived data. The OPC Alarms and Events specification is maintained by the OPC Foundation, and defines the exchange of alarm and event type message information, as well as variable states and state management.[2] By 2002, the... See the comprehensive history on one PDF file here.

Please share your feedback with us – send us an email to office@opcfoundation.org Open Platform Communications (OPC) dates back to the late 1980s when a consortium of industrial automation businesses saw the need for a common method of exchanging data between equipment from different manufacturers. Prior to OPC, each firm had its own communication protocols, which made it difficult for devices from multiple manufacturers to communicate without friction. OPC was established as a solution to this issue, giving a standard set of protocols and interfaces that any device maker could adopt to enable their devices to communicate with one another. OPC Classic, the first version of OPC, was published in 1996 and soon acquired significant acceptance in the industrial automation sector. OPC’s capacity to facilitate real-time data sharing between devices is one of its most significant advantages.

In industries such as manufacturing, where timely and accurate data is essential for effective operations, this is crucial. OPC also permits the integration of data from numerous sources, facilitating the collection and analysis of data from a variety of devices and systems. OPC has evolved throughout time to accommodate the evolving needs of the industrial automation industry. The second version of OPC, referred to as OPC Unified Architecture (UA), was launched in 2008 with considerable enhancements over the original OPC Classic specification. OPC UA offered support for internet protocols, making it simpler to link devices over the internet, as well as a more flexible data model that enabled the interchange of complex data structures. OPC – History OPC (OLE for Process Control) is an industry standard created with the collaboration of a number a leading worldwide automation and hardware software suppliers working in cooperation with Microsoft.The organization that...

The OPC Foundation’s forerunner — a task force composed of Fisher-Rosemount, Rockwell Software, Opto 22, Intellution, and Intuitive Technology — was able to develop a basic,workable, OPC specification after only a single year’s work. A simplified, stage-one solution was released in August 1996. The objective of the OPC Foundation is to develop an open, flexible, plug-and-play standard that allows end users to enjoy a greater choice of solutions, as well as sharply reducing development and maintenance costs... <img fetchpriority="high" fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4369" src="https://instrumentationtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/instrumentationtools.com_opc-protocol.png" alt="OPC Protocol" width="579" height="332" /> The OPC Foundation has been able to work more quickly than many other standards groups because OPC Foundation is simply building on an existing Microsoft standard. Other groups which have had to define the standards “from the ground up” have had a more difficult time reaching consensus as a result of the scope of their work.

Microsoft is a member of the OPC Foundation and has given strong backing to the organization. However, Microsoft has been careful to remain in the background and let the member companies with direct industry experience guide the organization’s work. One of the most valuable aspects of Microsoft’s participation is the fact that it hosts an annual OPC Foundation meeting in Redmond,Washington (Microsoft Headquarters) to provide Foundation Members with a preview of coming developments... Many Foundation Members are small companies and would not receive that kind of briefing from Microsoft if they were not Foundation Members. End-Users are encouraged to join OPC Foundation, and several manufacturers actively participate in the specification and technical review process. Both End – Users and Automation Suppliers benefit from having a standard.

For every automation system installed today, there is a significant amount of time and money spent on integration. OPC ensures that automation systems can share information and interoperate with other automation and business systems across their plant or factory. The need for OPC is probably best traced back to the introduction of Windows 3.0 in 1990. With Windows 3 it became possible, on an inexpensive, mainstream computing platform, to run multiple applications simultaneously. Even better, Windows provided a standard mechanism for those applications to exchange data at runtime. This mechanism was Dynamic Data Exchange, or DDE, and it was not long before users saw the benefits of having their process or plant data 'piped' into general purpose applications like Microsoft Excel.

Soon however, the limitations of DDE became clear. It was not terribly robust, there was no support for DDE across a network, and, worst of all, its bandwidth was very limited. A number of notable attempts were made to rectify these shortcomings, of which Wonderware's InTouchTM SCADA software had the greatest impact. It introduced a means of networking DDE traffic (NetDDETM, which was later taken up by Microsoft), and also greatly increased the effective bandwidth of DDE by packing multiple data items into each packet or... The main drawback of this scheme, and others such as Rockwell Software's AdvanceDDETM, was that they remained proprietary, requiring payments to their inventors, and thereby guaranteeing that they would never attain the status of... When OLE 2.0 was launched in 1992, it was apparent that it would eventually replace nearly all uses of DDE.

It was more flexible, more robust, and used more efficient transport mechanisms. Around the same time, a group calling itself WinSEM (Windows in Science, Engineering and Manufacturing) began meeting at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters. This group's members were largely from the areas of industrial control and data acquisition, with Microsoft acting as a catalyst. A resource maintained by the Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Automation, Control & Plant Intelligence - Articles, Analysis, Reviews, Interviews & Views OPC (OLE for Process Control) is an industry standard created with the collaboration of a number a leading worldwide automation and hardware software suppliers working in cooperation with Microsoft.

The organization that manages this standard is the OPC Foundation. The Foundation has over 150 members from around the world, including nearly all of the world's major providers of control systems, instrumentation, and process control systems. The OPC Foundation's forerunner " a task force composed of Fisher-Rosemount, Rockwell Software, Opto 22, Intellution, and Intuitive Technology" was able to develop a basic, workable, OPC specification after only a single year's work. Copyright © 2025 Automation Media. All rights reserved. Disclaimer

A resource maintained by the Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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