OPC was formally an acronym for OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) for Process Control. Over the past years OPC has grown beyond the Microsoft OLE/COM technologies, and is used in a wide variety of applications outside of process control. OPC now stands for "Interoperability", more specifically as the OPC Foundation vision statement reads "Interoperability for moving information vertically from the factory floor through the enterprise of multi-vendor systems". The first OPC specification was a simplified interface for moving real time data. This later matured to become the OPC Data Access specification, which is far and away the most widely adopted and installed OPC specification.
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