35 Years of Tek and Me by Piet Hoenveld

My first encounter with Tektronix was in 1967, when I started at Remington Rand Univac as an on-site FE at the PTT (Dutch mail and telecom). They had a large Univac III installation which included a dual channel Tektronix oscilloscope. I think it was a 500 series and was in fact the first oscilloscope I ever touched. Used the oscilloscope to troubleshoot, adjust and maintain the system. One memorable story of the time was that when the memory of the Univac III was doubled from 16K (27 bit) words to 32K, which was quite expensive, a director of the PTT said “we are never going to need a computer with more memory”.

During the 1970s I worked as an FE and technical trainer for the Dutch subsidiary of California Computer Products (CalComp), who manufactured digital plotters. This job included extensive travel, as the region included Eastern Europe as well as Shell locations worldwide. Fortunately there was a Tektronix 422 which traveled well. Remember going to the Soviet Union frequently, as far as Sakhalin Island, and Nigeria with the 422. It was very much “have scope, will travel”. As the training manager I also purchased a couple of 922’s for the European Training Centre.

In the 1980s I was invited to join Tektronix. First as an IDG Marketing Assistant in the European Marketing Center, dealing with the 4050 and 4600 series and later as an IDD SE with Tektronix Holland (Tekso). We introduced the 4695, which included demoing a prototype. I remember having CMYK colored fingers for weeks as the thing would leak after travel. Every year the Tektronix plant at Heerenveen would organize a volleyball tournament which many Tekso staff attended, great times!

When Tektronix acquired CAE Systems, I was trained in Marlow UK and became a CAE SE. This was short lived however, as Tektronix sold CAE to Mentor Graphics within a year. I became an IDD SE again after that, sold many 4115’s and had high hopes for the 6000 series and XD88 graphics workstations. Besides, I had good contacts with a Tektronix joint marketing partner, Wavefront Technologies of Santa Barbara, CA, was to have their $30K to $120K 3D modeling and animation software called The Advanced Visualizer to be ported to Tektronix hardware.

After the 6000 series and the XD88 were canceled, I joined Wavefront Technologies (as employee #23) as their sales rep in The Netherlands. A year later I started as an independent reseller, Interactive Visual Systems, for Wavefront Technologies and sold their software for or with Silicon Graphics workstations. As many of my customers also needed color hardcopy, I became a Tektronix GPID reseller as well and sold quite a number of Phaser color printers and supplies. In those days the holy grail was digital video I/O from a computer. Tektronix was to make a VME bus digital video board (codenamed Avatar, I think) for Silicon Graphics workstations. We had tested a prototype here and were very enthusiastic, but alas, the board was canceled.

In 2002 I retired with 35 years of very fond memories of the Tektronix people, products and company in four capacities: as a user, a buyer, an employee and as a reseller.

Piet Hoenveld