alt Hacker NewsHah, the first engineering job I had was on Ovation DCS doing power plant controls. That system traces the lineage to the WDPF systems.
Was the server you mention here the actual DCS? With the Motorola CPU's? Running vxworks? Pretty cool recognizing something niche that is still, vaguely familiar. :)
The plant computer wasn't a DCS. I think it was a DEC. It gathered data from the control systems and instrumentation and had a bespoke in memory realtime-ish database. That database was then partially replicated down to the Sun workstations (code the 23 year old me wrote). Then the browser consumed that via a unix shared memory interface.