1970–1985
In 1974, the company acquired 256 acre in Wilsonville, Oregon where it built a facility for its imaging group.[9] By 1976, the company employed nearly 10,000, and was the state's largest employer.[9] Tektronix's 1956 expansion and, in 1962, Electro Scientific Industries' similar move to Washington County and expansion are credited with fostering the development of a large high-tech industry in Washington County, a number of firms which collectively are often referred to as the "Silicon Forest".[14]
For many years, Tektronix was the major electronics manufacturer in Oregon, and in 1981, its U.S. payroll peaked at over 24,000 employees. Tektronix also had operations in Europe, South America and Asia. European factories were located in Saint Peter's, Guernsey (then in the European Free Trade Association) until 1990,[20] Hoddesdon (Hertfordshire, UK) and Heerenveen, Netherlands (then in the European Common Market). Some oscilloscopes marketed in Europe and the UK were sold under the brand name Telequipment but many in the UK used the Tektronix brand name in the 1960s and '70s.
For many years, Tektronix operated in Japan as Sony-Tektronix, a 50-50 joint venture of Sony and Tektronix, Inc; this was due to Japanese trade restrictions at the time. Since then, Tektronix has bought out Sony's share and is now the sole owner of the Japanese operation.[21] Under the Sony-Tektronix name, the 300 series oscilloscopes were lightweight and totally portable. They replaced the model 321/321A oscilloscopes. Examples of the Sony/Tektronix models were 314, 323, 335 and 370.
During the early 1970s, Tektronix made a major design change to their oscilloscopes. The 5000 and 7000 series oscilloscopes maintained the plug-in capabilities that originally started with the 530 and 540 series; however, the choice of plug-ins was even greater. These scopes used custom designed integrated circuits fabricated by Tektronix. The CRTs were all rectangular and were all fabricated by Tektronix. These oscilloscopes provided on screen controls setting. The 5000 series was the general purpose line while the 7000 series were capable of a wide variety of applications and could accept as many as 4 plug-ins. One model, the 7104 (introduced 1978), was a true 1 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope.[22] Beginning with the firm's first cathode ray oscilloscopes, Tektronix has enjoyed a leading position in the test and measurement market. Although its equipment was expensive, it had performance, quality, and stability. Most test equipment manufacturers built their oscilloscopes with off-the-shelf, generally available components. But Tektronix, in order to gain an extra measure of performance, used many custom-designed or specially-selected components. They even had their own factory for making ultra-bright and sharp CRT tubes. Later on, they built their own integrated circuit manufacturing facility in order to make custom ICs for their equipment.
Tektronix instruments contributed significantly to the development of computers, test, and telecommunications equipment and to the advancement of research and development in the high-technology electronics industry generally.
As time went on, Tektronix fabricated more and more of their electronic parts. This led to very specialized skills and talents which in time led to employees forming new businesses. Some former Tektronix employees left to create other successful "Silicon Forest" companies. Spin-offs include Mentor Graphics, Planar Systems, Floating Point Systems, Cascade Microtech, Merix Corporation, Anthro Corporation and Northwest Instrument Systems (NWIS) – later renamed to MicroCase. Even some of the spin-offs have created spin-offs, such as InFocus. As Tektronix fabricated more specialized parts, they spread out their product base to include logic analyzers, digital multimeters and signal generators. The TM500 and TM5000 rack mount series was born featuring custom designed test instruments chosen by the buyer.
During this period, Tektronix acquired what were sold as the 8000 and 8002 Microprocessor Development System (MDS), the 8000 being a software development system running editors and cross-compilers with twin floppy disk storage, while the 8002 could be fitted with real-time emulators for several processors including the 8080, Z80 and 6502. These were later replaced by the 8540/8550/8560.[23] The 8550 was a standalone development system capable of being fitted with real time emulation hardware for several different processors. The 8560 emerged just after Bell Labs were able to sell UNIX commercially, and ran a mildly modified version of Version 7 UNIX, called TNIX, supporting 4 or 8 (depending on how many I/O processor cards were fitted) serial terminals, with a special High-Speed Input/Output, based on RS-422, to connect to a remote 8540. There was a hard drive of about 34MB, later increased, and a variable amount of RAM depending on the processor card fitted, which was either a DEC LSI11-23+ or a LSI11-73, which had a wider address bus as well as a higher clock speed. The final upgraded variant was the 8562. The 8540, of which several could be connected to the 8560, contained emulation hardware similar to that available for the 8550, including RAM cards, Trigger Trace Analyser, 1 or 2 processor emulator cards, each with external probe, etc. The 8540 had no software development capability, but worked with the 8560, or other systems such as a VAX, which would provide the software development environment. It was unique in its day, in that the serial terminal could be connected to the 8540, on the bench, or to the 8560, and would pass UNIX commands automatically to the 8560, which passed emulator commands back to the 8540 for execution, completely transparently. Thus a complete compile, link, load and emulate session could be run from a UNIX shell script, a facility probably not seen on any development system since. The 8540/8550/8560 supported many 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessor types, with a change of emulator cards and probes, and installation of assembler and possibly compiler software, and did not require any particular code to be linked in to the user's code to facilitate register tracing at breakpoints, a shortcoming of the only real alternative multi-manufacturer MDS of that era, by
It is not clear at present why Tektronix eventually withdrew from the MDS business, as their products were highly regarded.
