Richard Lincoln Ropiequet
Richard L. Ropiequet died of a stroke on April 25,2011 in Grass Valley, CA with his devoted family surrounding him. Born in St. Louis, Mo., and educated in Illinois, he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1944 and was immediately drafted into the Navy as a radar instructor for the Pacific fleet. In late 1949, he moved to Oregon to work at the fledgling Tektronix and married and started a family at the same time.
“Rope” was a key figure in early Tek, eventually rising to the position of Executive Vice President of Engineering before leaving to join the wave of plastics entrepreneurs of the 1960s. An inventive engineer, he held many patents in both electronics and plastics engineering. He was a brilliant pianist, humorist, poet, gardener and scientist — spending the latter half his life as a theoretical physicist.
His life's work culminated in a treatise on the elemental nature of the universe www.infiniteparticlephysics.com His website contains an article HOW I DEVELOPED IPP
Dick has a long legacy at Tektronix, and vintageTEK discovered when posting his obituary on the whiteboard in our Repair/Refurbishment Area, a visitor to the Museum Sam Mallicoat was a student of Rope's when Rope was teaching middle school students in Beaverton, electronic theory. These were after hours classes to train interested students in electronics. It seems to have worked well, Sam later worked for Tektronix, was a Silicon Forest entrepreneur, and currently is employed in a local high technology firm. Sam, and several other interested engineers, have been sharing ideas with vintageTEK for continuing this middle school electronics training in what we were planning as a Saturday Academy to promote electronics, specifically analog design, starting with fifth and sixth graders from the Silicon Forest.
His daughter Suzanne, has contacted vintageTEK, and following her future visit, may leave us with some memorabilia that will be worth a future visit to the Museum. [we now have a Richard Ropiequet page]
Ed Sinclair
Dick was so generous, gave us kids a bag of transistors (about 1958) and had a huge lab in his basement where we were fascinated by audio waveforms on his many scopes. He lived on SW75th and I had to cross the Sunset Highway on my bike to deliver his paper, not much traffic back then!
The man who put the time into the time base. A superb feat of logical design, it is this more than anything that makes vintage Tektronix scopes such a joy to work with. I have noticed many times the polymath nature of people who innovate through intellectual rigour and how very often such people are musicians too. As a kid, one of my Dad’s friends at RAE farnborough (England), Freddy Green was considered the Top Circuit Man and he qualified as a pharmacist. Dick Ropietquet, I salute you!