TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapters 6 through 9 of this book have presented the material in Sections 4 and 5 of ANSI/ISA-88.01. Different words and points of view were used with the intent of clarifying the words and figures in 88.01. Sometimes alternatives were presented, in the hope that SP88 might consider them for the next revision of 88.01. Chapters 1 through 5 presented introductory material on processes, design principles, process control, controlled equipment, and recipes. This was done partly in order to make explicit those things that are taken for granted in 88.01. SP88 had enough to do without dwelling on the past, but each member of SP88 had some understanding of what each considered to be the fundamentals of batch control. Then SP88 went about the work of updating those fundamental concepts where appropriate.
This chapter provides some idea of where things were before 1980, as well as the developments during the 1980s that affected the work of SP88 and gave them shoulders on which to stand. This recapitulation of the history of batch control appears here in order to prepare you for the discussion of the Control Activities section of 88.01 that begins in the next chapter.
The oldest batch control concepts, dating back to the alchemists, are the formula and the procedure, although they were not necessarily known by those names at the time. Alchemists developed procedures for powdering raw materials, reacting things in crucibles and retorts, separating liquids with distillation, and separating fools from their gold.
