Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. In November 2007, Danaher Corporation acquired Tektronix as a subsidiary. The company received a 2007 Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for compliance standards monitoring systems for Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standard and Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) transport streams. Several charities are or were associated with Tektronix, including the Tektronix Foundation and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in Vancouver, Washington.

History

1946–1954

The company traces its roots to the electronics revolution that immediately followed World War II. The company’s founders C. Howard Vollum and Melvin J. "Jack" Murdock invented the world’s first time base triggered oscilloscope in 1946, a significant technological breakthrough. This oscilloscope touted by Tektronix was the model 511. The model 511 was a time base trigger and time base sweep oscilloscope. The leading oscilloscope manufacturer at the time was Allen DuMont. DuMont pioneered the frequency synch trigger and sweep. Allen DuMont personally tried the 511 at an electronics show and was impressed, but when he saw the price of $795, which was about twice as much as his equivalent model, he told Howard Vollum at the show that they would have a hard time to sell many. Tektronix was incorporated in 1946 with its headquarters at SE Foster Road and SE 59th Avenue in Portland, Oregon. In 1947 there were 12 employees, and 250 in 1951. By 1950 the company began building a manufacturing facility in Washington County, Oregon, at Barnes Road and the Sunset Highway, and expanded the facility by 1956 to 80,000 square feet (7,000 m²). The company then moved its headquarters to this site, following an employee vote.

Tektronix 4010

The Tektronix 4010 series was a family of text and graphics computer terminals based on the company's storage tube technology. There were several members of the family introduced through the 1970s, the best known being the 11-inch 4010 and 19-inch 4014. They were widely used in the CAD market in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The 4000 series were much less expensive than earlier graphics terminals, such as the IBM 2250, because no additional electronics were needed to maintain the display on the screen. They remained popular until the introduction of inexpensive graphics workstations in the 1980s. The new graphics workstations used raster displays and dedicated screen buffers that became more affordable as solid state memory chips became cheaper.

History

The Tektronix direct-view storage tube was first used in the Tektronix 564 oscilloscope in 1963, and was first used for non-oscilloscope applications in the 601 monitor in 1968. A number of graphics terminals based on this tube and others from the 600-series were developed, including the Advanced Remote Display Station from MIT's Project MAC, and the KV8I (later, KV8E) from Digital Equipment Corporation using the later 11-inch diagonal 611. These consisted of just the tube and related basic electronics, it was up to software on the host computer to produce a display by driving the controls directly.

Tektronix 4105

The Tektronix 4105 was a video terminal introduced by Tektronix in 1983. It could be used as a conventional text terminal supporting the ANSI escape codes of the VT102 or the VT52, as well as a graphics terminal using their own Tektronix 4010 series vector graphics. In graphics mode resolution was relatively limited, at 480 by 360 pixels, but it added a wide variety of new commands to the original 4010 set, including up to eight colors on the screen. The color commands would become a standard in their own right, and is supported by most terminal emulators supporting the Tek 4010 series.

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