Sebastian was never a Tektronix employee. He sent us these photos and this story.

I've been hacking and fixing electronics-related stuff since I was a kid and I've also turned the hobby into a job, being a design engineer for switching power supplies, analog signal conditioning and motor inverters for over twenty years now. Having always lived in Munich, my fondness of and sympathy with the Netherlands is family-related; mijn overgrootvader komt uit Rotterdam (my great-grandfather is from Rotterdam) - and I have the best memories of my family's yearly visits to his home when I was a kid.

I can't put the educational value of the time spent fixing old test equipment (and everything else that fails around the house) in better words than Jim Williams did in his article "The Importance of Fixing" in The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design edited by Jim Williams, Boston, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. Besides Oscilloscopes (mainly Tektronix), signal generators and frequency counters (mainly HP), much of my valuable space at home is consumed by analog tape recorders and electronic or acoustic musical instruments.

I went on a trip to Harlingen in the Netherlands. While my train had a stop in Heerenveen on the way there, I remembered I had read the town's name many times on some of my 453s, 454s and 500 series oscilloscopes, and about the site's history a while ago. I had assumed it must have been long gone. From the vintageTEK website, I learned that the buildings were still to be found there, even in use to this day by a printing company, but with plans existing to have them removed soon.

I decided where to get off the train on my way back home for a walk and lunch break. You know, Harlingen (Friesland) - Munich (Bavaria) by train means you sit quite a lot, so I felt like a little exercise was a good idea. I greatly enjoyed walking ~4 km from Heerenveen's station through the center and along the street through nice residential neighborhoods until I reached the corner of Marktweg and Heremaweg and street address Marktweg 73a.

The pictures were taken with my cell phone and I stayed on the sidewalks and avoided walking on private property. I do hope that at least some of the very nice tall trees will survive the construction site for whatever will be built there. Judging by their size, they must have been planted in the 1960s after Tektronix's buildings were finished, roughly 60 years ago.

Sebastian