Re: Why the fcuk...
"The biggest problem in industrial control systems is that almost control system manufacturers are strongly wedded to highly proprietary hardware, software, and especially communications protocols."
Standardise interfaces not implementations.
GM, Boeing, and other big players saw this issue coming almost three decades ago.
The answer was to open things up, so that simple secure multivendor interoperability could become the norm rather than the exception.
Go read about MAP (Manufacturing Automation Protocol) and TOP (Technical Office Protocol) and such like, back in the days when it was cool to talk about Computer Integrated Manufacturing as well as CAD and CAM. This was ages ago, even before the days of da Interwebz, so relatively little stuff is readily available online.
Many (most?) of the major automation and SCADA vendors joined the party, even Siemens (who also had their own conceptual equivalent of MAP, Siemens AP). Some computer vendors came along too. The Microsoft camp obviously wanted to go their own way with the aforementioned COM/DCOM etc, but MS were happy to recruit key people from other industry players, as you do (buongiorno Lorenzo! Come sta?).
But widespread implementation would have required lots of investment in various places, with limited short term benefit, so the ball was kicked down the road, and in due course the MAP and TOP products largely disappeared. After all, nobody's ever going to need more than Modbus are they.
Three decades later, people are visibly paying the price.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
