In the Beginning: My Tech Evolution

In the Beginning...

Before there was #AstromanAV, so long ago that MSDOS was a newly hatched egg and Apple IIe was the newest marsupial mouse running from the IBM raptors, I was born.

Oh, not born as in a new egg, but as a young man newly recovering from a job-site accident and needing to get out of the construction trade. During the mid-1990’s a deacon at my church asked me if I would like to come to work for him. Les Taylor owned American Standard Circuit Labs in Upland, California. Guessing at my latent abilities he installed me in his Engineering department headed by a friend of mine. (Tim’s name to fame was producing some of the first production runs of the Pac-Man videogame motherboards).

In Engineering I was assigned to a lumbering dinosaur of technology: A Digitizer. This giant Techosaurus was a huge quarter-ton slab of black granite topped by an optical “bombsite” with two XY spinners and a foot pedal. This was connected to a small refrigerator sized box stuffed with giant chips and boards connected to a green-screen monitor and built-in keyboard using paper-punch tape for storage!

I taped large plat's of film with enlarged hand-laid circuit patterns onto the granite block. Using buttons on the console and the XY spinners I aligned master sight-marks to the zero point in my optical display hood focused on the film. Then I pressed the foot-pedal, and an X##.### Y##.### number was printed on a line in the monitor. Thus, I followed colored marker lines I had drawn all over the film connecting all the common size hole pads; .010, .125, .025, and so forth.

[If anybody out there knows what I am talking about and has a pix of one of these digitizers, please let me know!]

Previously I had spent at least several hours using pencil and paper and a “desk” calculator, entered values, and typed in machine commands to register and step-and-repeat the pattern to create multiple copies. This was to maximize the usage of the 18” x 24” FR4 (circuit board fiberglass) production panels. Some of the larger motherboards had up to a thousand .010 via holes in the pattern. This had to be repeated for each side or addition internal layer for each board. When finished, I punched out the finished program onto a long roll of paper-punch tape and put it in a labeled round plastic container. Then I sent it to drill for a proof panel which QC check against the film. Any corrections made, a reproof, then approval to produce the product was given.

This laborious process could consume dozens of hours—per layer! One particularly large motherboard took me a solid week to complete, without the several reproofs required (and the manager slamming the ruined proofs on my desk!) These boards went into the Hubble Space Telescope (and no, did not affect its vision problems!)

I tell you all of this as the birth pangs presaging the best thing to ever happen to me: We bought an MS-DOS computer with VisiCalc on it! (I was already playing with an Apple IIe and soon bought a “Wozzer” IIgs)

Within the year I was able to increase Engineering’s production by 400%! Using a communications program, I connected the DOS computer to the Digitizer with a serial cable enabled dumping the raw XY data into VisiCalc, creating and manipulating the offsets and step-and-repeat commands automatically. I still had to punch it to tape for the drill and router machines to use, at least until the next year when we strung a long serial cable to the drilling department connecting the machines to my DOS computer. An AB switchbox on the drill room end of the cable did the switching. My first Network!

And my career was born!

After over twenty-five years of being in the industry I have found that the process, though very different in actual parts and pieces, is exactly-the-same! Find a way to use technology to better a process, create a workflow, provide a product. Make Your Job Easier! And even better, leave that job to another so you can do it again.

A few years later we started making circuit boards using copper, steel, or aluminum substrates. FR4 fiberglass does not conduct heat very well. Large power components soldered to a circuit board overheat the board making it brittle and cracking. The Bergquist Company, in Minnesota contracted with us as we had experience using metal substrates. They have a “secret sauce” that allows heat to pass through to the backing while maintaining dielectric separation. In the end, the great military cutback of the late 1990’s shuttered ASC Labs. But the owner’s son and I were hired by Bergquist Company to build a new T-Clad? factory (Bergquist’s name for the special sauce process, which was spun off as a separate company at Bergquist’s sale to Henkel).

Eventually I retired from Bergquist as the Senior IT Manager/Engineer having traveled the world and the depths of high-tech manufacturing and production. Through that time, I have advanced through PC’s, Desktops, AS400, Unix, Pearl, Phone systems, and IT Infrastructure in new and purchased factories, Server Farms, Corporate-wide Y2k remediation, Networking, Software Creation, Call Centers, Outsourcing to China… You get the picture.

I may be the Dinosaur Emeritus at Astroman Legacy Group, yet I still find joy in making things work and seeing processes and systems work in ways that enrich the employee’s workspace and the company’s bottom line—all while having fun doing it!

Sean Reid, CEO of Astroman Legacy Group and I have had a long association, and we both are intrigued and satisfied by this ever-changing evolutionary landscape; rooted the in processes of the past.

And have fun and prosper as you do so, life is long and with Tech, you’ll never go extinct!

Go forth and create your own In The Beginning…