(Click photo for full size, and again to magnify)

We want to thank Rod Gilbert, an ex-Tek ME, who is also an accomplished woodworker, for the marvelous job he did on building the Donor Wall for our Museum. Another donor who will be identified later, just qualified for his name to be added, when his employer, Google recently matched his donation.

A reminder to other potential donors, The Tek Foundation matches employee contributions at 100%, and Tek retiree donations at 50%, until the annual fund amount is used up. We will have the Tek Foundation policy and the forms on our website shortly. Other corporations such as Microsoft and Qualcomm have matched their employee donations as well.

We will be planning a recognition ceremony this summer for our donors.

Ed Sinclair

Stan Griffiths and Bill Den Beste have been cataloging these cartoons for years, beginning with the first one I saw, the TeK Wizard on a skateboaard (W301) was found cavorting on the Vertical Output Amplifier Schematic. To date, they had found nine cartoons, with this being the tenth!

The first nine discovered can be viewed at Stan and Bill’s earlier website: http://www.reprise.com/host/tektronix/humor/

We will scan the Pinup Girl and see about showing all ten on www.vintagetek.org soon.

 We are planning a ceremony to honor our donors and present them with a momento to display on their desk or bookcase. We will serve refreshments and hopefully get some nice photos to publish.

There are seven Donor Levels ranging from $1,000 on up: Palladium-Diamond-Platinum-Gold-Silver-Bronze-Crystal.  We currently have eleven donors that we will be honoring on our wall, and at some sort of reception.

We want to give thanks to Rod Gilbert, an ex-Tek who is a wonderful woodworker. Rod donated his design and woodworking skills to make our Donor Wall a reality.

Ed Sinclair

1. Click on the DONATE NOW button;
2. Select Amount to Donate
3. Donate

We use PayPal to Process Donations, but you do NOT NEED A PAYPAL ACCOUNT to Donate.

Our PayPal account accepts donations from Visa, Master Card, American Express, and Discover Card.

Donations go directly to our bank account, and the website immediately creates email notifications, and receipts, to Donors and to vintageTek!

Please consider a donation, we are a 501(c)3 public educational charity, and donations are fully deductible, Federal and State.

Sincerely, Ed Sinclair

Ed Sinclair

http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_19357792

Ed Sinclair

His son, Will Gannett, is a Ph D candidate in Physics attending Berkeley. As any proud father might, dad had us Google an article his son co-authored: Nanoscale Reversible Mass Transport Memory.

Nanoscale Reversible Mass Transport For Archivsl Memory

In this paper the Berkeley and the Pennsylvania State Physicists describe a robust memory device, nanomechanical in nature, with an estimated configurable density exceeding 1 terabits/sq in! Current hard disks in 10-100GB/sq in density have an estimated storage lifetime of only 10-30 years! The thermodynamic stability of these new devices at room temperature is in excess of one billion years!

I was disappointed that the only measuring device mentioned was a Transmission Electron Microscope, a device Tek once developed, and then killed in 1969.

Ed Sinclair

CRT Photos

Ed Sinclair

As for Prof Lee’s book Winning With People: The First 40 Years Of Tektronix, Tektronix evidently printed 50,000 copies, 10,000 in hard cover. vintagetek has been given permission by Tektronix to reprint the 1986 book. In preparation, Julie Kawabata vintageTek Librarian, has created an Index for the book, which makes it much more useable. We have these printed and available at the Museum for a $5 Donation.

Ed Sinclair

Marshall Lee Oregonian article

Ed Sinclair

Styled Vollum Interview with logo

Many thanks to Dave Brown for recognizing these videos as important to Tek history, and converting them to DVD. Thanks also to Steve and Charles Vollum for editing these videos and producing the final DVD product. We are grateful to them and the Vollum Family for donating these interviews to vintageTek.  The total interview is now 2:52, and requires a dual layer DVD. vintageTek will produce these as gifts to donors sometimes in the near future.

We have posted this transcript for our website visitors to enjoy. We have plans to INDEX this transcript, and will put this on the DVD. Due to production expenses and added content, it will have a recommended donation of $50.

Ed Sinclair

My Years At Te…

By Miles Tippery

Book Preview

This softcover book can be purchased from vintageTek at our Museum, for a $25 donation. We are located at 4620A SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy Portland, OR 97221. Our publisher, BLURB, provides the Book Badge above if you would prefer to order this book directly from the Publisher. They are $30 online. Click on the link and oreder directly from Blurb.

Ed Sinclair

“Rope” was a key figure in early Tek, eventually rising to the position of Executive Vice President of Engineering before leaving to join the wave of plastics entrepreneurs of the 1960s.  An inventive engineer, he held many patents in both electronics and plastics engineering. He was a brilliant pianist, humorist, poet, gardener and scientist — spending the latter half his life as a theoretical physicist.

His life’s work culminated in a treatise on the elemental nature of the universe www.infiniteparticlephysics.com  His website contains an article HOW I DEVELOPED IPP

Dick has a long legacy at Tektronix, and vintageTek discovered when posting his obituary on the whiteboard in our Repair/Refurbishment Area, a visitor to the Museum Sam Mallicoat was a student of Rope’s when Rope was teaching middle school students in Beaverton, electronic theory. These were after hours classes to train interested students in electronics. It seems to have worked well, Sam later worked for Tektronix, was a Silicon Forest entrepreneur, and currently is employed in a local high technology firm. Sam, and several other interested engineers, have been sharing ideas with vintageTek for continuing this middle school electronics training in what we were planning as a Saturday Academy to promote electronics, specifically analog design, starting with fifth and sixth graders from the Silicon Forest.

His daughter Suzanne, has contacted vintageTek, and following her future visit, may leave us with some memorabilia that will be worth a future visit to the Museum.

Ed Sinclair

The document can be viewed here: TekOscopes_Aug60 IBM Scope Training

Ed Sinclair

When we began design of this new website our departed friend and colleague C. Norman Winningstad had recently died. I felt it would not be proper to take this article down until the public had seen our tribute to Norm, even though this means we will be late acknowledging news about other notable Tek figures as well.

Norm was a regular contributor to our ex-employee email reflector “gateslist” founded and maintained by John Gates to our delight, as it gave all of us the opportunity to converse regularly about “Mother Tek” where most of us created indelible memories, and a lot of friends, in our working years.

Norm was very outspoken, never shy about his opinions, and continued to endear himself to his friends, with his regular comments on gatelist. I am sure he would not have been surprised that some disagreed with him as well.

The story I like best about Norm, and that I heard often, was how he was trained in the Navy on vacuum tubes, and graduated from UC Berkeley with a specialty in vacuum tubes in 1948, the same summer that Bell Labs announced the transistor. (The Bell Labs transistor was announced in the same Electronics Magazine issue that Tek announced the 511 in 1948). Norm would always end the story with “I graduated obsolete”.

I first met Norm during my stint in FE Training in 1969, and in the Field I had taken the first T4002 order in the LA Region, shipping to Edwards AFB, before there were IDD Specialists. By the time the T4002 shipped, Ralph Thomason was the designated specialist and accompanied me to Edwards to visit the customer. Norm is credited with founding what later became IDD at Tektronix., and was featured with this product in the 1970 Tek Calendar.

Ed Sinclair

A few weeks ago, I signed up for facebook, twitter, and Google+ and do not have the time to figure out how to operate these media. I do know that several important audiences have signed up to follow vintageTek on twitter, along with individuals that we do not want to disappoint. In addition, we have received almost a hundred “referrals” to our website from facebook, which are also important to our building traffic to the site.

This is a volunteer position and requires someone who knows how to set up our “page”, and communicate with our followers. I have arranged to set up a WordPress plug-in S2Member that allows “membership” on the vintagetek website, and also a mechanism for website users to “subscribe” to our Blog posts. I have no idea whether this is extensible to Social Media as well.

Ed Sinclair

Academy student candidates will be selected from those eager to major in the art of analog design in their careers. The Academy duration will initially be 2-3 years, and provide a Certificate in Analog Concepts.

Following the tradition of early Tektronix Engineering Managers, who held classes to train future EE’s on weekends and evenings from our local schools,  the academy will provide classroom education, and  hands-on measurement labs, progressing from block diagram concepts through building design kits that teach analog concepts.

The Managing Director is a volunteer position, and will require an experienced EE, or a related discipline, willing to define a Strategy and Implementation Plan that defines a curriculum, it’s duration, level of certification, and integration with High School and University level programs where analog design concepts are relevant.

Nominations for this position are being accepted now, in anticipation of a Summer or Fall 2012 introduction.

Nominations should be submitted to Ed Sinclair eds@vintagetek.org

Ed Sinclair  503-209-5894

Ed Sinclair

We are curious about two things. First the format of Engineering News appears to be almost identical to later Technology Report, and since their date date preceed Technology Report – we are assuming Technology Report succeeded Engineering News?

Secondly, we have a number of articles torn from these documents, with a page color that matches neither of the whole publications that we own. The pages are tan or light brown in color. Any ideas what circa document the tan pages were torn from?

Ed Sinclair

Besides Technical Articles Engineer Profiles were also included, a sample I have attached here on Charlie Rhodes.

Charlie Rhodes Technology Report Article

The Storage Story

Ed Sinclair

Tek series 500 development

This is an interesting read, even inserting the development of the 570 tube curve tracer, and the 575 transistor curve tracer that enabled engineering to characterize tubes and transistors to further the performance of their designs. John describes 1n 1957 when HP introduced a scope with a 100x sweep magnifier. HP, they theorized, must have thought they had us because our post accelerator CRT design limited us to 5x magnification. Beyond that, the beam hits the deflection plates, and secondary electrons are accelerated forward to the display area, creating blobs of light on the screen, worsening at higher magnifications. Solution, paint the CRT plates with the carbon material used for making the spiral resistor. It made the problem look better,  and allowed us to produce a 533/543 with a 100 times magnifier.

Ed Sinclair

Ward Cunningham

Visitors started arriving ahead of the 9am opening on Friday with many notable ex-Teks. One of the first was Ward Cunningham, the Father of Wiki, who I had never met.
Many other long time ex-Tek personnel appeared, including John Kobbe, Scott Foster, and Deane Kidd coming by earlier in the week. Another hundred ex-Teks cannot be named due to space restrictions. Thank You All.

Museum Entrance

Museum Visitors

John Kobbe and the Fosters in our Library

Bruce and Nancy Baur did a wonderful job donating snacks, sandwiches, and even cases of wine which I believe most visitors enjoyed. All I heard were compliments! All the Volunteers were very helpful, and much apprecaited.

The Museum will be open Fridays and Saturdays beginning September 23, 2011.

We are located at 4620A SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy, between Shattuck and 45th, E of OR-217

Ed Sinclair

Ed Sinclair
Stan Griffiths

Ed Sinclair

Ed Sinclair

In my recent meeting with Logan’s significant other, Holly Black Belleville, she said Logan was Secretary of the local IRE (IEEE?) when WWII broke out, and he and several others from Portland moved to MA and worked throughout the war at the MIT Radiation Laboratories.

I assume he returned to the Forest Service Radio Lab in Portland, and then came to Tektronix.

Ed Sinclair

We have the technology, but I am fast losing the bandwidth to do much about any solutions myself. In this vein I am asking for Volunteers that can dedicate some time and energy towards developing methods for recording our history, and displaying it on our website and Museum.

I began with a website “Button” named EMPLOYEES, and below that level I came up with several categories:

1. Biographies

2. Technical Excellence-Hall of Fame

3. Oral Histories

4. Photo Books

5. Recollections

As for Biographies or Autobiographies I envision individuals, family members, or co-workers writing Biographical sketches about family members, co-workers, or themselves, that describe their time at Tektronix. For example, John Kobbe has written some anecdotes regarding his experiences, Jack Day has written three papers regarding his personal experiences opening Field Offices for Tek, and his experiences working on the TEK/US Government Lawsuit. We are aware of Miles Tippery’s autobiography which we will reprint.

I had spoken with a few folks already about replicating the B50 Hall of Fame for Tek patent holders, to live on forever in our Virtual Museum, as well as in our Brick and Mortar Museum. As Tek continues to atrophy, we would like to ensure these Honorees, and their commitment to “Technical Excellance” are not forgotten.

If persons are not as prone to writing at length, perhaps they can share shorter writings under the Recollections heading where smaller anecdotes can be posted.

For those that don’t care for writing altogether, we have small Digital Voice Recorders we can loan to record Oral Histories or Biographies in their own words, or perhaps Volunteers can be interviewers?

We have a large collection of Tektronix Photo Books that include photos, names, and in some cases departments where employees worked since the early Fifties, to the massive May 1970 (last) Photo Book containing approximately 13,000 Employees. What if, we could scan, and OCR the names of all former employees shown in these books, and invite them, their families, or co-workers to find their names in our database and allow them to post Recollections about them on our Museum website? They can of course commemorate loved ones by purchasing named bricks at the entrance to our Museum.

Please select an area that would interest you and you could spare the appropriate effort to make it happen.

With SQL Database tools, and our WordPress blogging & content management applications, we can store this information for the future generations of Engineers & Entrepreneurs. And perhaps some (gasp) Sales and Marketing contributors as well.

Sincerely,

Ed