I have devoted 35 years to SMOC and other forms of Advanced Process Control and on line optimization.My focus has gone back and forth between developing technologies and applying them. I have soon experienced that the crux of performance was to maximize the embarked process knowledge whilst remaining able to update and exploit it on line. Such has been the driving force for the grey box modeling concept of SMOC.I have been fortunate to work with a number of outstanding people. I first want to pay tribute to Professor Guy Bornard of Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble. In the early seventies, he designed a simple state space model predictive controller and thus opened the way leading to SMOC. I also want to acknowledge the contributions of Eric Rayssac, Jean Luc Rouby SMOC companion of all times, and Pierre Carrette, to the evolution of SMOC culminating with SMOC Pro today (Yokogawa’s EXASMOC). Last, I owe special thanks to Pierre Olive, virtuoso of grey box modeling, with whom extraordinary SMOC applications have been developed.The applications I have been involved in are in refinery, steam cracker, specialty chemicals, batch and continuous polymer processes. For me, an APC project involves basic control review/challenge, operator interface design, definition of required on line analyzers, chemometrics or estimators. There is still a lot of innovative APC work ahead, (i) for large plant wide applications combining multivariable control and steady state economic optimization (ii) for smaller demanding control applications requiring some first principle modeling. I do share the sustained enthusiasm of the two glorious industrial APC pioneers Jacques Richalet (IDCOM) and Charlie Cutler (DMC).I am now a retiree and part time consultant. My interest and best added value is in the detailed design of APC, notably SMOC applications. I am also interested in the cross-fertilization between industry and university.