So a friend and I headed out for a run today and on the way to the trails decided to take the shortcut across the lands of our friendly neighbourhood giant big-oil corp. oil refinery. This refinery was nearly 100 years old until it was mostly decommissioned and dismantled in the 1990s, although a portion of it still operates as a storage/transfer station for certain products. So after a little bushwacking and fence-hopping we were running down gravel roads between cement pads filled with weeds, cut-off steel stairways to nowhere, pipeline sections poking out of the ground and assorted other heavy-industrial detritus, while keeping an eye and ear out for the possible security-person-containing-vehicle to come bouncing over the hill. Off to one side of our route was one very old two/three story red-brick building that has yet to be demolished. This building looks like it could have been built in the 20s or 30s. We decided to take a peek. The big two-storey service door was open to the skies, but the building was still filled with equipment: giant motor/pump sets, engines/generators, steel walkways, pipes everywhere, peeling paint, all dead and quiet, just pigeons in the rafters and the occasional whoooosh from some pressure vent outside to spook us. My friend and I went upstairs into a room with the floor and shelves littered with crates, small motors, bits of equipment, cabling, etc. On one wall was a green & black, full-height, double-wide equipment cabinet, one door half open and large circuit boards visible in a rack. My brain started to tweek. In the mid-70s, as a high-school student, I and a few other students had a visit to the refinery one day to be shown the computer system that ran the refining operation. About the only thing I remember from that day is that it was a Foxboro real-time process-control computer that had been installed some years earlier. I had figured it was now long gone from when the refinery was decommissioned and the newer buildings, where the computer was likely to be located, were demolished. But there's not a lot of reason other than a computer system for circuit boards that large to be hanging around an oil refinery. Sure enough, the cabinet had a little "FOXBORO" logo up in one corner. Looking around a little more turned up a very large floor-standing video console with "FOX-1" in addition to the "FOXBORO" logo on it, a GE termi-net printer/terminal, and a sub-room packed with racks of what appear to be the I/O interface/drive equipment (where all the wires from the sensor/control points around the refinery terminate and are interfaced to the processor). Pulling a couple of the circuit boards from the main cabinet suggests the processor is TTL-based, although there were date codes from the early 80s so it may have been upgraded from the 70s. The console was quite cool, I speculate displayed process equipment/flow diagrams; date codes on ICs in it were still early 70s. Didn't see any disc or mass-storage device or even paper-tape I/O. Considering it's real-time application perhaps it functioned without a disk, just booted the whole system (from what?) at startup and survived in RAM. I don't know a lot about Foxboro, I believe they were a spin-off or startup company in the 60s that were early entrants into the (then small and state-of-the-art) area of computer-based real-time process-control for large industrial plants. They are one of those names you don't run across much unless you run in those circles. Additional comments about Foxboro and their systems from those who may know more appreciated. My friend finally dragged me out and we continued on our run into the forest with a little dip in the lake on the way home.