开云体育

If you haven't seen the OPB "Oregon Experience - The Spirit of Tek" the museum now has a limited number of DVDs for sale on our eBay store. OPB showed this recently and does stream this video but I'm sure you will want to own your own copy. All proceeds support the museum.

And for those outside of the USA, where the DVD doesn't ship, the URL for streaming is:

We haven't opened up sales outside of the USA until we verified what the region codes were on the DVD. We're just in the process of doing that now.

Dave

There is no format or region code on the DVD or box. We have confirmed that it is an NTSC format All Region DVD and it should play on most computers and PAL DVD players. As such we have opened up the sales worldwide. We just wanted to be sure before we offered it for sale in other regions.

Just watched the show. All I can say is “marvellous.” Great to see some of the people who made Tek what it became, and see how they look now, at least when the film was made. Thanks to whoever made it available. Incidentally I found it even more interesting than the Tektronix movie which I have on DVD.

It was an uplifting story and sadly, that culture is almost extinct in the corporate world. The core of the success was the fact that EVERYONE at TEKTRONIX was working toward one goal, that is to be the best and build the best! There was not any evidence of the caustic "them - vs - us" mentality which plagues most companies, large and small. Compare this to GM (just one example) and one can readily see the stark contrast in worker and management relations. One can note that the decline of TEKTRONIX began when it became a publicly traded company AND when Mr. Vollum retired. This story is too often repeated. I really enjoyed the story and it makes me appreciate these fine instruments even more than ever. When I look inside a scope and see a tag or a part with a set of initials or a name written on it, it makes me think of this film.

--
Michael Lynch
Dardanelle, AR

Thanks Brian. That was a very good video. Wish I had worked there. I remember working at Raytheon in Seattle from 1970 to 1980. During that time, a Raytheon representative came to our office and wanted to sell us Raytheon scopes. I showed him my 465. I told him that the Raytheon knock off was inferior and to go away. Yes, Raytheon refused to use its own oscilloscopes in favour of Tek. As you can guess that branch of Raytheon died a quick death.

I remember watching this from the OPB website, is it no longer there?? I guess it's been a while.??
-Dave

Not to take this too far off topic, but I work for Raytheon now, and it's pretty hard for me to imagine RTN building their own scopes!? I didn't know about the scopes, but I do remember the RC4558 op amps and the DSP chips RTN acquired from TRW in the 1980's or 1990's.?Later, I worked for RF power amplifier manufacturer Powerwave.? We had more than a few engineers come over from a competitor, Spectrian.? Spectrian management had the bonehead idea of fabricating their own transistors, instead of buying them from Motorola.? The former Spectrian engineers had had to use their own crappy devices!? 20 years later and both Spectrian and Powerwave are out of business.? ?Oh well.JimSent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone

One thing to remember - in those days employees owned the company from the feeling of being part of it. Nowadays the companies own you instead.

Greg

Yes Jim, I was in my office back in the 70s when their sales rep showed up. Of course he tried to imply I was disloyal for not buying Raytheon scopes. We both know there was no scope better, even HP scopes. I was spoiled and would not have wanted to see anything in our shop but 465s. Maybe you could ask around talking to old timers to see if they remember this. My guess is that this branch of Raytheon could not have lasted more than a few months. Who in their right mind would buy one? Clearly it was a terrible decision. Raytheon has the money to handle this kind of failure.

O.T. BTW, I hope your work environment is as good as I had. My boss let me do whatever I wanted as long as our office made money. I did get some flack when I sold complete new electronics to 9 Iranian destroyers after their revolution. Made a great month for me. But my boss said if we were caught the publicity would cost more money than we made that month. Complete electronics meant surface and air search radar, sonar, fathometers, IFF, and radios. They were updating old US destroyers they had purchased. I realized at the time there might be a problem, but wisely got the money up front in cash. Scared me to death walking to my car on the pier with suitcases full of money. It was not until 1980 that Manchester noticed the large sale and purchaser. We regularly serviced Soviet ships for cash up front. Never any credit offered. The design of their radars was suspiciously very like our own Raytheon radars and so they came to us for service. We had the parts and technicians. Seemed like most of the officers spoke English. It was a wonderful time in my life fixing so many different things and meeting people from all over the planet. Now down to repairing transceivers and stereos, sigh.........