As we prepare for our 21st PI North America General Assembly Meeting, I decided it was time to take a look back – 10 years back. The interval was not chosen randomly; I started with PI North America in February 2005. So I stepped into the Wayback Machine; not Mr. Peabody’s, archive.org which has saved snapshots of 432 billion web pages.
Our website in 2005 trumpeted our achieving 10,000,000 PROFIBUS nodes installed. (We have over 
50,000,000 installed through 2014.)
We were called PTO in those days, having been founded as PROFIBUS Trade Organization. I was on the founding Board of Directors back in 1994 when that happened. We changed our name to PI North America to reflect the international identity. Funny that. The individual regional organizations create the international organization, not the other way around. We learned that rebranding is no fun.
The website promoted our free training classes for PROFIBUS and PROFINET (8 cities and 11 cities, respectively). I started teaching them that year and have been doing that ever since. Seventeen all-PROFINET classes in 2015.
PROFIBUS and PROFINET Certified Network Engineer classes were also promoted. We still do a bunch of these every year.
PROFINEWS was also included – bimonthly in those days, monthly now. And I “graduated” to become its editor last year.
We were inviting folks to visit our booth at ISA Expo. That event is long gone, but it was fun while it lasted.
There was a link to “The Value Proposition of PROFIBUS in the Hybrid Industries.” This white paper is apparently timeless since it is on our current website to this day.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, click around the old PTO website at The Wayback Machine.
–Carl Henning