Talk:Tektronix/Archives/2020

The Microprocessor Development System era. Can you add information?

I have added a bit about this, in the relevant chronological spot, as these products were very significant in their time, being the best on the market, just like the oscilloscopes. I used to use the 8540/8560 extensively, and know them inside out. But, I am very light on information as to where their predecessors, the 8000/8002 originally came from. I am certain that they were not originally engineered by Tektronix, but were reputedly at the time (no Internet, only dead tree publications!) bought from a company in an unusual place, maybe Corsica or Sardinia, and were in fact the very first development systems anywhere that supported microprocessors from multiple manufacturers. There was a great demand, so as to not be committed to following one semiconductor manufacturer, a form of vendor lock-in. It would be very nice if we could fill in the details correctly, with supporting evidence.

As this topic is a bit complex, should we perhaps think about moving it to an article on the history of Microprocessor Development Systems? Or does it belong somewhere else? There is probably a lot more that could be written. Tiger99 (talk) 14:30, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

I was the first Marketing Product Manager at Tek for the Microprocessor Development Systems. We acquired the product from Millenium Systems, who had designed and manufactured it first. Tek engineers reviewed and modified the product to conform to our standards, including the Tek blue color, but Millenium continued to manufacture it. Design of a replacement, to be built by Tek, was started immediately after introduction. I left before that was even close to completion, and have nothing to add about later products.

I have a problem with the entire article as it is misleading about Tek's businesses. The MDS business was not that significant compared to the other operations. Of course the Portable Scopes (especially the 465B and the portable storage scopes) and the Lab scopes were their bread and butter. Logic Analyzers were a smaller business, and were in the same business unit as the MDS products initially. They did a good business with portable TDRs (Time Domain Reflectometers), especially with telephone companies and aircraft manufacturers. There was a Semiconductor Test Systems business, IIRC, and television products (including Grass Valley Group). Again, a little vague, but I recall an SDS unit that sold equipment that used the storage scope technology to do high speed data acquisition and A-to-D conversion. The digital products were another entire group, located at the old Sunset plant in the early '70s and then in the mid-'70s moved to the new Wilsonville plant. They started out with desktop calculators and graphics (and some raster alphanumeric) computer terminals. They introduced the 4051 graphic computer, in 1976 IIRC - I was the second product manager on that, after the man who proposed the product, and was involved in its development. The 4081 was the first of their graphics workstations, with many technical innovations. Initially we brought in printers from DEC to sell with the 4051, and later color printing technology developed at Tek led to a line of wax-based color printers. Ultimately the printer business took over the Wilsonville facility and was sold to Xerox.

I believe that the 24k employees were just the US-based employees, not including especially the Guernsey facility. I remember a 28k number for worldwide employment.

My main point is that Tek was a very large and diverse technology company that made an impact in much of the instrumentation sector, of which the MDS part was very small potatoes, at least through the early '80s. At the moment my plate is full, but for any interested I recommend digging up the old annual reports for better data. And please include all of the other, less sexy, businesses they were in.

Tek started heading downhill with the final retirement of the surviving founder (Howard Vollum) or even a bit earlier, although it took a few years before it showed in revenues. Bringing in the Honeywell executives led to hiving off many parts of the corporation, and the end of Tek's inclusive culture.

Unfortunately all I can offer at this point is recollections, but I hope it will help guide research. — Preceding unsigned comment added by PDXsailor (talk • contribs) 02:22, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

I remember Tektronix from when I worked at IBM GPD San Jose in the late 1980s to early 1990s. IBM bought us many fantastic Tektronix color plotters that I really enjoyed using! At that time, I was engaged to Monica Lam's first PhD student. I mention that because he shared an office at Stanford with two other computer science PhD students; both were funded by Tektronix for their work in graphics. I wondered what happened to Tektronix. I wish there were more sources available to clean up all the "citation needed" tags in this article. I will dig around a bit, but I suspect that you are correct, PDXsailor about little of the company's history being accessible online now.--FeralOink (talk) 02:49, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

As to the reason Tek withdraw from the microprocessor development business: I was with Tek Germany during this time and my neighbor on the right side in the service lab was the technician servicing these systems here in Munich (I was doing TM500, portable scopes, 7000 series and Telequipment). I remember quite well when Tek withdrew. We used to chat about what's going on from time to time and Mr. Willie told me simply that they constantly loosing money with this business and so decided to terminate it. As you might know, Tek had already a hard time in those days I remember and there had to be 'clean-ups'. This was also daily talk and might shed a little bit more light on the detail here. (As I'm German I think that my English is not good enough to edit the main article by myself, so anybody who feels to use this bit of information is welcome.) 95.91.251.53 (talk) 21:56, 18 September 2020 (UTC)R.Drechsler