Al DeVilbiss
Al DeVilbiss was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard.
John Addis wrote:
Al was at HP from Dec 1965 until Feb 2002, and did logic analyzers in mid-career. He designed the 1830A, 250 MHz plugin for the HP 183A, which includes the IC design of the first monolithic IC oscilloscope. [Note by John Addis: Double layer aluminum metal is shown in the HP Journal article on the 1830A in January 1970. Double layer metal was not available at Tektronix until in its SH3 vanadium gold process in about 1982!].
Al made a major contribution to the optimization of the 183A's CRT, including its lens design and deflection plate structure. He says John Riggen probably designed the HP 1755 2T vertical PI for 175A (all tube) scope. Al did the large-screen HP 1300 series verticals.
When Al returned to oscilloscope design in the late 1980s, he again made a major contribution by designing the famous input attenuator which allowed 6.5 pF input C. He designed the preamp and the digitizer for the 54510A. It was the first of several digitizers he designed for HP.
The obit for Al DeVilbiss reads:
Alan J DeVilbiss of Colorado Springs, Colorado, died April 16, 2011. Friends and family are invited to attend services at Fellowship of the Rockies Church, Tuesday, April 26, 2011, beginning at 2:00 p.m. Alan was born June 24, 1938 in Jennings, LA. He earned a BSEE at Louisiana Tech, and an MSEE at CalTech on a Tau Beta Pi fellowship in 1962. He accepted a position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab designing electronic circuitry for the unmanned lunar and planetary exploration spacecraft Ranger, Mariner Venus, Mariner Mars, and Surveyor.
In 1965 he moved to Colorado Springs to work at the new Hewlett-Packard plant on Garden of the Gods Rd. There he revolutionized the design of high frequency oscilloscopes, and designed some of the very first custom integrated circuits. He was instrumental in the development of many test instruments, early computers, and the origins of computer connections. He specialized in pushing the limits of measurement range, and accuracy, and making test instruments faster, more sensitive, accurate, and precise.
He retired from HP in 2000, and built a beautiful home adjacent to Garden of the Gods. He completed it with an innovative custom-designed workshop that was featured in Fine Woodworking magazine. He was a member of Pikes Peak United Methodist Church, a gourmet cooking club, a bridge club, and he followed the Colorado Rockies. He enjoyed chess, poker, cribbage and backgammon. He loved many different types of music, played the trumpet, coronet, and French horn, and often bought season passes to the Pikes Peak Philharmonic. He won many racing trophies in a sports car club. He loved the outdoors, motorcycling, 4-wheeling, hiking, fly-fishing, camping, sailing, and was a long-time member of the YMCA. He built a photography dark room, custom speakers, a closed-circuit TV system, a workshop, a custom home theater, a violin, an electric guitar, furniture, custom landscaping, and a home office. He held patents for scientific and electronic inventions.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Roy and Gwen DeVilbiss; his sister, Mary Bell and brother Albert DeVilbiss. Survivors include his wife, Karen; his son, Alan D. DeVilbiss; his daughter, Kimberley DeVilbiss and her husband Gary Coleman; and three grandchildren, Kayla, Spencer and Kent Coleman; and sisters, Roynell Troutman and Beverly Crider. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Alan J. DeVilbiss Memorial Scholarship at the College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.