Linley Gumm

Linley Gumm

Linley Gumm (? – ?) recalls his experiences starting at Tek:

I joined Tek on June 15, 1964 joining the Instrument Evaluation group under Jerry Shannon. The first thing that happened to me was I spent something like the first nine weeks working as a test technician in Plant 2 in Building 39 testing 545B and 647 scopes. I was never very good at it. Jerry put me there to make sure I understood the environment that new products went into. On Sept 21, 1964 I would have been back at the Sunset plant working in the evaluation group (Building 81?) working for Herb England for perhaps five weeks. I was so raw that I cringe at the memory.

Regarding the possible Tek 106 design notes document:

In any case, the only thing on that page that is familiar is my characteristic printed signature. I do very vaguely remember reviewing some small aspect of a new generator that involved floating power supplies. I was blown away at the time by the rather cavalier use of same. It all made sense but it was wildly different from anything I had seen at the time. The design of that generator was well along when I first saw it.

The nomenclature of the "new 105" on these drawings makes it almost certain that this is an early set of Type 106 drawings. The Type 105 was a physically large, high voltage (i.e. approximately 100 volts p-p) square wave generator. It was entirely done out of vacuum tubes so it also made extensive use of floating power supplies. The 106 was a box to replace the 105, reducing its size plus adding the capability of generating lower voltage waveforms with a much faster risetime.

At that time at Tek, the Instrument Evaluation organization was responsible for the design and limited production of equipment used in manufacturing test. Over time some of these products were deemed to be of sufficient quality and interest to be sold to the public as products, if for no other reason than that they were specified in oscilloscope manuals as necessary for calibration. They would start out as 067- test fixtures and then later be given a product ID (I don't know if the 106 went this route). This involved things like time mark generators, sine wave sources, load test boxes, etc. Therefore, a box to replace the 105 would be done in the Instrument Evaluation group. I noted Bill Lukins name on some of the documentation on the Tekwiki web site. I believe he was one of the major players in the 106 development.

(As a completely off-the-subject aside, the 140 color bar generator started out as a 067- test fixture intended to test vector scopes. I have some early front panels of same in my garage. Charlie, of course, fully intended to sell them as a product from the get go but needed to pretend to be doing a cal fixture to get permission to develop it.)

In any case, I don't believe I drew the diagram on that page. At that time I used a template and my resistors had many fewer points. Further, all of the lettering is much better than I have ever been able to do. The only thing I recognize on that page that might be done my me is the 3.9K notation scribbled above R402.

Links

• TekWeek March 27, 1987: Chief Engineer Linley Gumm

Components by Linley Gumm

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  Sunset Building 81