2021 marks the 75th anniversary of Tektronix. The company was formed on January 2, 1946. The name registered for the company was Tekrad. Miles wrote in his autobiography: Believe it or not, one of the most difficult tasks we faced early on, as the year 1945 drew to a close, was the selection of a name for our company. We wanted a name that could be copyrighted, which put considerable restriction on what we could use. For instance, common names were not acceptable nor were names of persons. Several different names were suggested. None of them sounded appropriate until I finally came up with the name Tekrad, Inc.
Miles continued to write: However, a short time later we discovered another company in California, known as the Technical Radio Company, had registered a name spelled Techrad. Because we didn’t want to have confusion with the similarity of names, we decided to change our name; which again resulted in a long name-choosing session. We spent a lot of time and had gotten nowhere until I proposed the name Tektronix, Inc., a copyrightable name which I thought inferred something of our company’s business and still was unique enough so it would not likely be confused with any of the many other new electronic firms beginning to sprout up around the country.
The museum is working on several projects to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Tektronix. Watch our website for details.
2020 marks the close of the 9th year of operation of the museum. While we were closed for a good portion of the year, we did accomplish a lot thanks to our volunteers. We started the year with a remote booth at the University of Portland's Family Stem Day. We were open for regular business at the museum through mid-March. Once closed we held weekly Zoom meetings with our volunteers to continue to enhance the museum and our on-line content.
12 new photos were selected and added to our Photos of the Month.
Volunteers participated in a video interviews conducted by the MJ Murdock Charitable Trust for their production of a new video biography of Jack Murdock.
Added 20 new pages to our website including the first 20 Annual Reports, a number of Tek Times, and individual employees and anniversaries.
We added content to many other pages such as Tek Talk which now has 114 issues. We've enhanced many of the site pages including China, Guernsey, Hoddesdon, Heerenveen, India, and Japan (Sony/Tek) to better address our worldwide audience. We also added significant content and photos covering early company history at the Hawthorne, Sunset, and Beaverton sites.
We worked to acquire rare instruments for the museum including a 121 Preamplifier, 517 High Speed Oscilloscope (we believe the only working 517 in the world), 7612D Programmable Digitizer, 7520 Transient Digitizing Oscilloscope, and a 570 Tube Curve Tracer. We now have 82 Exhibits on our website.
We registered the museum as a non-profit to receive donations through the Amazon Smiles program.
Our January Photo of the Month is a mysterious Type 1100 Storage Display Unit. A Type 1100 product was never produced by Tektronix and the bezel and curvature of the display doesn't match the flat face of a DVST.
If you have an item, story, documentation, photos, or videos to donate, please contact us. If you would like to volunteer, also please contact us. Our regular email is on our home page.
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