Tektronix
Based on Wikipedia: Tektronix
Allen DuMont, the king of oscilloscopes, picked up the Tektronix Model 511 at an electronics show in 1947. He tested it. He was impressed. Then he saw the price tag: $795—about twice what his own comparable model cost. He turned to the young inventor standing nearby and told him bluntly that he'd have a hard time selling many of these things.
That young inventor was Howard Vollum. And DuMont was spectacularly wrong.
Four Men and $10,400
The story begins in December 1945, in the chaotic months just after World War II ended. Four men pooled their money—$2,600 each—to start a company. Howard Vollum had just returned from the Signal Corps, where he'd worked on radar equipment. Jack Murdock and Miles Tippery had served in the Coast Guard. Glenn McDowell was an accountant who could keep the books straight.
They called themselves Tekrad at first. A California company named Techrad sent them a polite letter suggesting they find something else. So in 1946, they became Tektronix, Inc.
Vollum had graduated from Reed College in 1936 with a physics degree and what his colleagues would describe as an obsession with oscilloscopes. An oscilloscope is essentially a device that lets you see electricity. More precisely, it displays electrical signals as waveforms on a screen—voltage over time, rendered visible. For engineers troubleshooting electronic equipment, it's like giving a doctor the ability to watch a patient's heartbeat in real time.
Before the war, Vollum had worked as a radio technician at Murdock's appliance store. During the war, he'd seen how oscilloscopes were used to maintain and repair increasingly sophisticated military electronics. And he'd noticed their limitations.
The Triggered Sweep
The oscilloscopes of the 1940s had a fundamental problem. They used what's called a "free-running sweep"—the electron beam that traced signals across the screen would sweep at a fixed rate, regardless of what the signal was actually doing. This made it difficult to capture and display irregular or infrequent signals. The waveform would drift and jitter. Getting a stable picture required luck as much as skill.
Vollum invented something called the triggered sweep. Instead of sweeping continuously, his oscilloscope would wait until the signal reached a specific voltage threshold, then start the sweep. This meant the display would start at exactly the same point in the waveform every time. The image was stable. Repeatable. Useful.
It sounds like a small thing. It wasn't. The triggered oscilloscope is to electronics what the microscope is to biology—the tool that made an entire field visible and therefore workable.
The Model 511, produced from 1947 to 1953, incorporated this breakthrough. It cost twice as much as DuMont's competing product. It sold extremely well.
Building in the Rain
Tektronix was incorporated in 1946 in Portland, Oregon, just six blocks from Murdock's childhood home. They started with 12 employees. Four years later, they had 250.
By 1950, they'd outgrown their original space and began building a manufacturing facility in Washington County, along the Sunset Highway. By 1956, that building had expanded to 80,000 square feet—roughly the size of a modern supermarket, though filled with test equipment instead of groceries. The employees voted to move headquarters there.
Then, in 1956, a larger property in Beaverton became available. The company's employee retirement trust bought the land and leased it back to the company—an arrangement that tells you something about how Vollum and Murdock thought about their business. Construction began in 1957. On May 1, 1959, Tektronix moved into a 313-acre campus that would come to be called the Tektronix Industrial Park.
Vollum and Murdock were, by all accounts, unusual businessmen. They wanted to run their company "as one might run a large and caring family," as one history put it. In 1978, the book "The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America" listed Tektronix among its selections. This wasn't just feel-good public relations. The company's benefits, its working conditions, and its culture were genuinely distinctive for the era.
The Plug-In Revolution
In the late 1950s, Tektronix engineers had an insight that would shape oscilloscope design for the next three decades. They made the oscilloscope modular.
Think of it like a stereo system where you can swap out the amplifier or the turntable. The 530 and 540 series oscilloscopes let operators switch in different "plug-ins"—modules that changed what the instrument could do. One plug-in might give you a different time scale. Another might add different input channels. Others could transform the oscilloscope into a spectrum analyzer, a cable tester, or a device for characterizing transistors.
This was clever business as well as clever engineering. A customer who might not be able to afford multiple specialized instruments could buy one oscilloscope and gradually expand its capabilities. And once they'd invested in the base unit, they were committed to the Tektronix ecosystem.
The 530 and 540 series also introduced the delayed trigger, which allowed triggering to occur between sweeps rather than only at the beginning. This made waveforms even more stable and easier to analyze.
Going Portable
In 1961, Tektronix did something that seemed almost contradictory: they made an oscilloscope you could carry around.
The Model 321 was the world's first truly practical portable oscilloscope. It could run on wall power or on rechargeable batteries. It weighed about 20 pounds—not exactly light by modern standards, but revolutionary for the time. And it was almost entirely solid-state, using transistors instead of the fragile, power-hungry vacuum tubes that had defined electronics for decades. Only a single specialized vacuum tube, called a Nuvistor, remained in the input stage.
A year and a half later, the Model 321A eliminated even that last vacuum tube. The oscilloscope had entered the transistor age.
The Military Connection
In 1966, Tektronix introduced the 400 series—high-frequency portable oscilloscopes packed with features for field work. The Model 453 had a bandwidth of 50 megahertz, meaning it could accurately display signals with frequency components up to 50 million cycles per second. The following year's Model 454 pushed that to 150 megahertz.
These weren't just good portable instruments. Many engineers preferred them to the bulkier laboratory models. The United States military certainly noticed. They contracted with Tektronix for a "ruggedized" version of the 453, hardened to survive the rough handling of field service.
The 400 series was so successful that competitors began copying its styling. Some of these oscilloscopes were still in daily use as of 2013—nearly fifty years after their introduction.
Oregon's Largest Employer
By 1976, Tektronix employed nearly 10,000 people and was the largest employer in Oregon. The company's presence in Washington County—along with similar moves by companies like Electro Scientific Industries—had sparked the growth of what locals began calling the "Silicon Forest," a nod to California's more famous Silicon Valley.
The name was apt. Just as valley became a metonym for California's semiconductor industry, forest captured the Pacific Northwest's wetter, greener character—and its growing cluster of high-tech companies.
Tektronix's U.S. payroll peaked in 1981 at over 24,000 employees. The company also operated factories in Europe—in Guernsey, in England's Hertfordshire county, and in the Netherlands—and had operations in South America and Asia.
In Japan, where trade restrictions made foreign ownership complicated, Tektronix operated as Sony-Tektronix, a 50-50 joint venture with the electronics giant. Under this arrangement, the partnership produced the 300 series oscilloscopes—lightweight, portable instruments that eventually replaced the pioneering Model 321. Only later, as Japanese trade policy liberalized, did Tektronix buy out Sony's share and take full ownership.
Making Everything Themselves
Here's something unusual about Tektronix: they built almost everything in-house.
Most test equipment manufacturers assembled their products from commercially available components. Tektronix took a different approach. To achieve the performance levels they wanted, they designed and manufactured their own components—including the cathode ray tubes that formed the oscilloscope's display, and eventually their own integrated circuits.
The CRT, or cathode ray tube, is the technology that powered television screens and computer monitors before flat panels took over. A beam of electrons is fired at a phosphorescent screen, creating a glowing point that can be swept across the display to draw images or waveforms. Tektronix built their own CRTs because they needed tubes brighter and sharper than what was commercially available.
They built their own integrated circuits for the same reason—to push performance beyond what off-the-shelf parts could achieve.
This strategy had consequences beyond just product quality. Building specialized components required specialized skills. And when engineers with those skills decided to leave Tektronix, they often started their own companies.
The Silicon Forest Grows
The list of Tektronix spin-offs reads like a directory of Oregon's technology industry. Mentor Graphics, which makes software for designing electronic circuits. Planar Systems, a display technology company. Floating Point Systems, which built specialized computers for scientific calculations. Cascade Microtech, Merix Corporation, Anthro Corporation. Some of the spin-offs spawned spin-offs of their own—InFocus, the projector company, traces its lineage back through the Tektronix family tree.
This pattern—a large company serving as an incubator for the talent that eventually leaves to start competitors and adjacent businesses—is familiar from Silicon Valley. Apple begat dozens of companies. Fairchild Semiconductor's alumni founded Intel, AMD, and scores of others. In Oregon, Tektronix played that role.
Too Many Directions
Success can be its own kind of trap. By the 1980s, Tektronix had expanded into numerous markets: printers, terminals, displays, software development systems. The company had become a conglomerate, and conglomerates are hard to manage.
Earnings declined almost every quarter. The company went through waves of layoffs, management changes, and divestitures. In 1994, they spun off their printed circuit board manufacturing operation as Merix Corp., headquartered in Forest Grove, Oregon.
Eventually, Tektronix contracted back to its core business—the test and measurement equipment where it had started. When Rick Wills became CEO in 2000, he imposed strict spending discipline just as the dot-com bubble was collapsing. The timing was fortunate. While other technology companies floundered, Tektronix emerged as one of the largest companies in its niche, with a market capitalization of $3 billion by 2006.
But even that wasn't enough to remain independent. In 2007, Danaher Corporation—a diversified industrial company that has made a strategy of acquiring and optimizing manufacturing businesses—purchased Tektronix. Today, the company operates as a subsidiary of Ralliant, itself a spinoff from Fortive, which was itself spun off from Danaher. The corporate genealogy is complicated, but the bottom line is simple: Tektronix is no longer the independent company that Vollum, Murdock, Tippery, and McDowell founded with their $10,400.
The Digital Transformation
While the ownership changed, the technology evolved even more dramatically.
The oscilloscopes of the 1940s through the 1980s were analog instruments. They displayed electrical signals by literally steering a beam of electrons across a phosphorescent screen—the signal controlled the beam's movement directly. This had advantages: the display was instantaneous and could show very fast signals. But it had limitations too. You couldn't easily store a waveform for later analysis. You couldn't perform calculations on it. And once the signal was gone, it was gone.
Digital oscilloscopes changed everything. Instead of steering an electron beam, they sample the incoming signal many times per second, convert those samples to numbers, and store them in memory. The waveform can then be displayed on any kind of screen, analyzed by software, stored indefinitely, and shared electronically.
Tektronix was heavily involved in developing digital sampling oscilloscopes. By the mid-1980s, they had replaced their analog product lines with digital instruments—the 11000 series for laboratory use and the TDS series for portable applications. The 11000 series were large rack-mounted units with flat-faced CRTs, touch screens, and the ability to display multiple waveforms in different colors. The TDS series maintained the familiar portable form factor but added digital storage and measurement capabilities.
By the mid-1990s, even the cathode ray tube—the technology that Tektronix had mastered so thoroughly that they built their own—had been replaced by LCD panels. The shift happened fast. The 11000 series gave way to the MSO, or Mixed Signal Oscilloscope, with its color active-matrix LCD display. The TDS line adopted LCD screens starting with the TDS-210.
The Curious Case of the Microprocessor Development Systems
During the 1970s and 1980s, Tektronix produced something that might seem surprising for an oscilloscope company: sophisticated computer systems for developing software.
To understand why, you need to know something about how microprocessors were used in that era. A microprocessor is the central processing unit of a computer, the chip that executes instructions. But in the 1970s and 1980s, microprocessors weren't just used in computers. They were embedded in everything from industrial controllers to test equipment to early video games. And programming these embedded systems was hard.
You couldn't simply write code on the target system—often, the target system had no keyboard, no screen, barely any memory. You wrote code on a development system, a separate computer with proper programming tools, then transferred it somehow to the target. And debugging was nightmarish. How do you figure out what's going wrong inside a microprocessor embedded in a piece of factory equipment?
Tektronix's answer was a product line called the 8000 series. The 8550 was a standalone development system that could be fitted with "emulation hardware" for different processors—the Intel 8080, the Zilog Z80, the MOS 6502. An emulator pretends to be the target processor but gives you windows into its operation: you can stop execution, examine registers, step through code line by line.
The 8560 ran a modified version of Unix (called TNIX) and could support four or eight serial terminals. It could connect to multiple 8540 units—hardware emulators that could be placed right on the workbench next to the equipment being debugged. The system was sophisticated enough that you could write a shell script that would automatically compile your code, load it into the emulator, and start debugging—a workflow that wouldn't seem out of place today.
The 8560's documentation boasted of a feature that probably no other development system of its era could match: the terminal could be connected to either the 8540 or the 8560, and commands would be routed automatically to the right place. You could work on the bench with your hardware or at your desk with your software, seamlessly.
Tektronix eventually withdrew from this business, and it's not entirely clear why. The products were well-regarded. Perhaps the market was simply too different from test and measurement equipment. Perhaps the rise of personal computers made dedicated development systems obsolete. The company's records are silent on the matter.
What Remains
Howard Vollum died in 1986. Jack Murdock had died earlier, in 1971. Their company survived them by decades but no longer exists as an independent entity.
What remains is harder to measure. The Silicon Forest that Tektronix helped create is still there, though its composition has changed. The engineers who learned their trade at Tektronix spread across the industry, carrying skills and expectations about quality and performance. The triggered oscilloscope that Vollum invented in 1946 evolved into instruments that can capture signals changing billions of times per second.
And somewhere, probably, a Tektronix 400 series oscilloscope from the 1960s is still in use—still displaying stable waveforms, still working as designed, still justifying a price tag that Allen DuMont thought was too high.