William A. Leonard

From 1982 to 1991 I was employed in the gauging industry. The gauges measured various aspects of sheet materials: thickness of plastic sheets, resin content of fiberglass and coating weights on textiles to name but a few. These gauges used microprocessors such as the Z80 and, later, the Motorola 68000 and were programmed in Pascal. The compiled programs were "burned" into EPROMS. There were no disk drives or operating systems.

We wanted to develop a product hosted on an IBM PC which would allow a manager or operator to monitor one or more gauges and other manufacturing processes of perhaps several production lines from a single location. The information displayed would come from our gauges and possibly from other process controls too. The system would not control the process variables but would interface with the controllers to adjust setpoints.

I was made Director of R & D and given the task of developing the Plant Manager. Its capabilities are more eloquently described in the reprints below. Of course, the product belongs to my employer but I was solely responsible for its design, implementation and delivery. I'm very proud of it and that's why I include this appendix to my resumé.

Below are some articles from trade magazines and a few photos we used in our brochures.