Bob Haas
Robert Eugene Haas (b. January 27, 1947 in Omaha, NE – d. August 21, 2024 in Tualatin, OR) was an engineer at Tektronix and a staff member at the VintageTek Museum in Beaverton.
Bob received his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in 1969.
In 1976, Bob joined Tektronix at the new Computer Graphics Campus in Wilsonville. He worked on several projects including the 4052, 4041, TMC510, and the 4100/4200 series aka Unicorn. He was responsible for evaluating and selecting the display monitor for the Unicorn project. He finally chose Panasonic, which began a 17 year partnership between Tektronix and Panasonic/Matsushita. Bob called himself the “6 million dollar man” because the annual volume was 10,000 at $600 per monitor. In the 4052 project, Bob implemented the floating-point routines in microcode to realize a significant speed up (he had to convince management first to allow this development).
In the May 1978 Tek Communications Directory, Bob was in IDG (Information Display Group) in Building 60, in September 1978 in GCS (Graphic Computing Systems) Engineering in Building 61. He is not in the November 1979 Tektronix phone book and by that time he had apparently moved on to the Panasonic/Tektronix partnership.
In 1983, Bob set up his own computer based consulting business. Among his clients were Intel, Mentor Graphics, Tektronix, and Merchaid. He went to work for a start-up called Microfield Graphics in about 1989, designing computer interfaces for their hardware such as laser-scanned whiteboards.
In 1995 he moved to OrCAD, doing computer aided design software and testing. He stayed in this position about 6 years. By 2001 he moved on again, this time to Maxim Integrated Products, retiring in 2014 shortly after Maxim was acquired by Analog Devices.
In his retirement Bob got very involved with the VintageTek Museum where among other activities he recorded several repair videos].
Bob passed on August 21, 2024.
The administrators of TekWiki are deeply grateful for Bob's help over the years, both in terms of editing the wiki and uploading files, but also in terms of contributing information and sending material to upload. The benefit of his work will live on.