In 1901, while working for Milwaukee Electric, Lynde Bradley (a teenager at the time) devised a better way to build the controllers that regulate motor speed. He soon quit his job, secured a small $1,000 investment from his lifelong friend, Dr. Stanton Allen, and co-founded the Allen-Bradley company with his brother, Harry Bradley, in 1903. The primary focus of Allen-Bradley was,for several decades, motor controllers, until they received an unusual request from GM in 1968 to build a system to replace their hardwired relay logic with something more dynamic—a standard machine controller.
Program Data Quantizer II and the Programmable Matrix Controller
Allen-Bradley responded to GM's request with two solutions—first, a large, difficult-to-program, expensive minicomputer-based Program Data Quantizer (PDQ) II in 1970 and later, the smaller and easier-to-program Programmable Matrix Controller (PMC) in 1971. The...