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The History of Electronics and the Petroleum Marketing Industry

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The History of Electronics and the Petroleum Marketing Industry The History of Electronics and the Petroleum Marketing Industry Today a person can buy a computer 500 times more powerful than those that placed men on the moon. Is that what you need to run a business? John Hartmann and Cindy Dole trace the development of electronics and computers. To understand how electronics affects the petroleum equipment industry, it is essential to understand computers and their evolution. Therefore, we will be devoting a series of articles to the various aspects of this subject over the next 12 months. It is the aim of this series to help make everyone’s job a little easier. The first article traces the development of electronics and computers in general, some of the key innovators, the major obstacles they had to overcome and breakthrough events that resulted in so much progress being made in so little. In the next issue, PE&T will run the first of a two- part feature on the current electronic systems in the petroleum equipment industry today. In 1997, we will also publish a two-part feature on the future of station automation. The heart of today's computers are microprocessors with billions of circuits. Pictured here is a Hewlett-Packard microprocessor chip. When Cindy Dole and I began preparing this article, I thought I knew a great deal about what has been done in this field and what can be expected within the next five to ten years. I didn’t anticipate that one of the world’s largest data processing companies would announce plans to provide off-site services for retail petroleum marketers, or that equipment manufacturers would be expanding their scope to provide monitoring and maintenance. I did not expect to come back from Birmingham, England with a satchel of literature on systems already being marketed in the UK and Europe. Nor did I expect that computers 500 times more powerful than those that placed people on the moon would be available less than five miles from my office for less than $2,000. The evolution of computers and microelectronics technology has been so rapid in recent years that keeping up with the latest information, which we all suspect will soon be obsolete, can seem like an exercise in futility better left to the remarkable “techno-nerds” of Silicon Valley. Today’s integrated circuit is 500 times more powerful than chips made even five years ago, costs less, consumes less energy and generates less heat. And smaller, more powerful chips are introduced every month. So why learn today what will be out of date tomorrow? After all, we have lives to lead, families to raise, businesses to run. Who has the time for it all? Maybe the competition. This is an example of a comprehensive electronic inventory control system. It automatically reorders fuel when supplies are low. (The Autostick II by EBW). The edge in petroleum marketing Today, most service stations operate their electronic computer equipment as separate, isolated elements that have not been integrated into a single, overall system. As a result, the equipment includes many redundant and costly components (for initial cost and maintenance), such as power supplies, modems, printers and monitors. Within the next few years it will become commonplace to integrate all of the electronic equipment at one or more service stations into a single comprehensive station management information system. Some of the large oil companies have equipped their station electronic tank gauges with phone modems to essentially automate the reordering of fuel. When the tank gauge senses that a pre-set minimum level has been reached in a tank, it notifies the terminal and a delivery is scheduled. This results in no human intervention at the station and a vast improvement in the utilization of delivery vehicles for the supplier, since he can closely plan each day’s deliveries to optimize use of the fleet. The trend is to integrate systems in order to economize. Eventually, as more and more companies succeed in realizing such economies, those who do not succeed will become less competitive. Thus, integration of electronic systems will become a necessity. Computers 101: on & off = 1 + 0 Every piece of data on a computer screen, from the most realistic looking graphics (like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) to the most complex statistical analyses, are made up of a series of ‘on-off’ combinations represented by the digits ‘1’ and ‘0’. That’s because computers, in the end, are simply devices that can switch electrical charges on and off at lightening speed. These on-off combinations make up what is known as binary notation. Binary notation is a system that allows you to string together all those ones and zeros into logical combinations to represent more familiar letters and numbers. When eight of these ones and zeros, known as bits, are strung together consecutively, they are called a byte. These bytes, which can be strung together in 256 different combinations known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), form the basis of modern computing. Making use of these ‘on-off’ combinations requires two types of components: hardware and software. Hardware comprises all the physical components of a computer, the most important of which is the Central Processing Unit (CPU). CPUs are usually referred to by speed and capacity–for example, a 166 mHz pentium. Other key components are input, output and storage devices. Input devices allow you to enter information into the computer for processing. They include keyboards, scanners, mice and sensors. Output devices allow you to make use of the information you input. They include monitors, printers and modems. Storage devices allow you to hold information for future use. Read only memory (ROM) holds the information that controls the basic functions of the computer. ROM is permanent and cannot be overwritten. Random access memory (RAM) can be read from and written to, but only holds its information as long as the computer is turned on. Other storage devices include hard drives, floppy disks, tapes and CD-ROMs (Compact Disc–Read Only Memory). Software (such as Microsoft Word, Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3) comprises all the instructions that control the hardware and tell it what to do. The operating system, sometimes called the OS, is the computer’s foundation set of instructions. The OS can be compared to our autonomic nervous systems in that it automatically controls basic functions. Without an operating system, the thousands of commands necessary to perform a single computing job would have to be included in each application program. Application software, which sits on top of the operating system, is usually designed for a specific purpose, such as word processing, database management or playing games. Just as we rely on our autonomic nervous systems to instruct our hearts to beat, the application software relies on the OS to instruct the computer in its basic functions. A worker enters a product part number by touchscreen. It is routine practice today for production of parts to be monitored by computer. (Hewlett Packard) Computing devices before 1900 The abacus is a simple calculating device invented more than 5,000 years ago. It is simply a series of beads mounted on a framework of parallel wires. The beads are grouped together to represent numbers and then moved in specified patterns to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Primitive though it may seem, skilled users are very quick and the abacus is still used in the Mid- and Far East. Another great advance in the technology of computing numbers occurred in 1642 when French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, invented a mechanical system of shafts, gears and pins that could be used to add and subtract numbers. Ironically enough, Pascal invented this visionary system to help his father with an age old problem—the computation of taxes! Nearly two centuries later, another mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage, invented the ‘analytical engine,’ the plans for which were clearly precursors to the modern computer. Charles Boole, a contemporary of Babbage, took the concept of computing one step further and created the first workable system of symbolic logic. His system broke down numbers and letters into those combinations of ‘1’ and ‘0’ that are still used today as the basis for all computing. However, it wasn’t until Herman Hollerith developed his punch cards that a computational device was used on a large scale. Punch cards were pieces of paper with holes or notches punched out to represent letters and numbers, or with a pattern of holes to represent related data. Hollerith’s punch cards were first used on a large scale to compile the U.S. census of 1880, which greatly reduced the number of clerks and the time needed to compile the information. Punch cards were manually inserted into the pin box. When the lever was pulled, pin sensors would "read" the information and activate the appropriate counters, tabulating the census results. Developments from 1900 to 1947 The punch cards continued to be widely used until the introduction of other input and storage devices in the 1940s, and remained in use at various locations, such as college campuses, even through the 1960s. The company that eventually became IBM (International Business Machines) acquired Hollerith’s patent on the punch card and by 1939, IBM had the first fully automatic computer. Punch cards were used to input data: and the computer—which was 50 feet long and 8 feet high–could add, subtract, multiply, divide and reference tables. Though the computer was fully automated, it still required constant attention from skilled teams of engineers and technicians, who flipped switches, plugged and unplugged cables to provide instructions, and initiated and supervised the activities of the computer.
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