Jim Williams loved Tektronix

I have been spending a lot of time over at Linear Technology this week, talking to people that knew analog guru and EDN consulting editor Jim Williams. Everyone knows Jim loved test equipment, especially those old Tektronix mainframe oscilloscopes he kept huddled around his bench.

I remember reading in EDN 30 years ago, how Jim said you should never waste you r money on cheap aftermarket probes, no matter how tempting. I didn’t listen, and bought some of those cheap-off brand probes. Jim was right. The tops of the square waves were tilted due to capacitor soakage effects. The parts were cheap and broke. It took me a whole year to admit my mistake, but I went out and bought two 100Mhz Tek probes for my Hitachi oscilloscope. It was not the original Hitachi probes that were so crappy, but off-brand ones I got in a catalog.

Since then I have learned an important principle. The people who make oscilloscopes also make the decent probes. See, they have a vested interest in making the waveform correct on the display. So I have had good luck with my LeCroy and Agilent probes as well as those old Hitachi ones I replaced with the cheapos. I am sure Yokogawa and Anritsu and Rohde & Schwarz and the probes from all the other scope companies work fine too.

I don’t want this to become a Tektronix hagiography, but Jim did love his Tek equipment. So you can image my delight when I saw the copy of a doctored 100-dollar bill pinned to a backboard in a lab. No one knew how it got there. I don’t remember what lab. I don’t remember anything about where I saw this, so don’t ask. Plausible deniability. But you do have to love the “IN TEK WE TRUST ” on the obverse of the bill. That was Jim’s ultimate attitude about test equipment. They were like good friends, people you could trust, people that would not steer you wrong.

And interesting fact came out about the scope shots Jim used in many of his EDN stories. If you look at the picture below, or figure 6 in his article about acoustic thermometry we recently published, you can see two rows of irregular dots on the screen, centered on the third division line up, right in the middle of the tube.

Those are not phosphor burns, like I thought. They are dents in the plastic covering of the scope. It turns out back in the 1970’s when Jim was at MIT, he would get into part wars with his good friend Len Sherman, now senior scientist at Maxim Integrated Products. A parts war is kinda like a food fight, only with electronics components. The war would start with Lenny or Jim tossing a part into the middle of the bench setup the other guy was working on. That led to retaliation. This time, things got really out of hand, with the two of them crouching behind ‘scopes and throwing the parts as hard as they could at each other. I doubt either was wearing safety glasses.

So those dents, the little dots of light you can see in EDN articles spanning decades are the results of a errant DIP (dual-inline package) that Lenny threw so hard it embedded in the plastic covering over the Tek CRT (cathode ray tube). Jim tried to rub it out or use solvent, but saw he was just melting the covering, so he gave up. If you see a scope shot with those dents, it tells you Jim took it on his home lab scope. I assume Jim, the ultimate scope repairman, never changed the screen in order to tweak Lenny, who probably feels bad about it to this day.