Tek Engineering Circa 1962-1964

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All of instrument design from July 1951 until March 1966 was in Building 81.

The location of personnel in this document is primarily in the productive years of 1963 and 1964.

The following picture is of the east-facing wall looking NW with the Building 81 (Sunset South) entrance in its NE corner (center).

Building 81

Building 86 (Sunset North) is visible in the right half of the photo. It was located north of Building 81.

In the above photo dated June 1964 is the east wall of the “Sunset Plant”, Building 81, looking NW. The building was so named for Sunset Highway located a few dozen feet behind the photographer.

About 50 feet south of the north wall and running west was a hall where there were three engineering groups in July 1963. The bays for each group were about 50 feet deep and extended from the hallway to the nearest outside wall. There were two main hallways, north hallway and south hallway, both running east to west. Between the two hallways were located (from east to west) Howard Vollum’s office, Engineering vice president, Bill Polits’ office, Instrument Engineering Manager (Jack Rogers), Engineering administration (Dick Rhiger), Legal (Jim Castles), New Product Introduction (Deane Kidd), the cafeteria, and the parts room (Herb Crawford) extending to the model shop.

The north hallway ran east to west from behind the receptionist. The first engineering bay was Bob Rullman’s group working on the 544, 546, and 547.

Conventional Scopes (544, 546, 547)

Bob Rullman - Group Manager - horizontal sweep, sweep switching

John Gates - running the 545B project

Possibly Dave Barton, a very good engineer who left in about 1964

647 Group

West of Rullman’s group was the 647 group, initially led by Oz Svehaug. After September 1963, Oz left Tek for health reasons and the group was run by Oliver Dalton.

Low Frequency & Biomedical Systems Group

This was the next bay west of the 647 group. Russ Fillinger was the lead.

Marketing

West of LF and Biomedical and possibly on both sides of the hallway was marketing.

The west end of the building extending to the south hallway was the model shop.

Unknown manager Model Shop (took up width of the building from North Wall to the South Hall)

  • Les Wold
  • About 20 machinists, metal working equipment.

Going east from the west wall was the south hallway parallel to the south wall. Engineering bays were between the hallway and the south wall.

From the west wall going east was TV-Scan Conversion headed by Charlie Rhodes

Sampling Group

The next bay east was the Sampling Group, led by Al Zimmerman. Norm Winningstad may have had an office in this area.

Accessories Design Group

The next bay east was Accessories Design, led by Cal Hongel until mid 1963, then by Wim Velsink and later Ken Holland for years.

Digital Systems

The next bay east was Digital Systems, led by Jim Knapton.

Marlow Butler The front bay, was Mechanical Design

Gail Morris - Industrial Design

That may have brought us back to the front of the building.

Many people are missing from this page, and possibly even whole groups. If anyone can provide the missing information, please contact the administrator of Tekwiki.

Engineering Evaluation (Evaluation of new designs and engineering help) was located in Sunset North (45.5090 -122.7749) (Building 86). Building 86 was about 100 feet north of Building 81 and is partially visible in the above photo to the right of the Building 81 corner entrance. At the time, CRT Engineering was likely also in Building 86.

In about 1965 Wim Velsink suggested the formation of an Advanced Development group as most of the above products had been introduced.

This group was to research the ideas of Howard Vollum, mostly having to do with human interface such as a trigger control that allowed you to roll over a sine wave and have the trigger slope change a the top of the waveform. (This was actually introduced in some 7000 series sweeps, but was not popular.) Another was to have the trace intensity increase during rapid rise and fall so more of the waveform could be seen. Another project was to have the amplifier gain seek a full screen display. This was done in the 3A5 plug-in but also was not popular.

John Kobbe had the corner office (next to the outside south wall) and ran the group, presumably reporting to Wim Velsink.

Bob Rullman

John Gates

John Addis

Others

Norm Winningstad might have been in Sampling at that time, but not in a design capacity

Cliff Moulton had left in 1962 or early 1963.

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