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When I joined TI in 1974, I did so in its Calculator department. The department had three different product lines:

  • Consumer calculators. The best known was the Datamath (Figure 1). It was popular for many years before we began our drive for lower price rather than more features.
  • Professional calculators. It started with the SR-10 (Figure 2). I became part of this team as a Product Engineer on the SR-50A and SR-51A.
  • Desktop calculators. I began my career at TI working on the TI-500 which was TI’s first printing calculator (Figure 3).

The Datamath four function calculator.

The SR-10 scientific calculator.
The TI-500 printer calculator.

I was assigned to the desktop calculator product line as a sustaining engineer. My specific task was to keep the desktop calculators in production. This all took place in our Semiconductor Building in Dallas, Texas. My office was on the first floor and the products I supported were on the second floor; which was actually the third floor as there was the “space frame” between the floors for the facilities team to maintain the infrastructure without bothering the engineering teams and manufacturing lines.

My first lesson as a new employee was where the bathrooms were. When I asked people around me at my desk, they would say “it is upstairs”. I would go upstairs and not find the bathroom. When I asked someone in the halls up there about the bathrooms, they would say “it is downstairs”. I then went down back to my desk to ask again. It was finally explained to me that the Semiconductor Building (SC building) was in fact a three story building but only a few people actually worked in the middle story (space frame). But the bathrooms were in the space frame. That was an important lesson for me to learn.

I became fascinated with the space frame and a few years later, actually became one of those few who “worked” the space frame to their advantage, but not as part of facilities. I learned that a lot of semiconductor material was stored in the space frame to elude inventory, or was ready for disposition into the dumpster after failure analysis and field returns. Several of us, who were continually trying out new circuits, found this resource invaluable. One time, while wandering through the space frame we found a 55 gallon drum of power transistors. We were always in need of such devices to create power supplies, etc on the production line (and at home). So we grabbed a handful of the transistors knowing they were on the way to the dumpster. The lady assigned to that area caught us doing the deed. She asked what we were doing, at which time she informed us that they were bad transistors, confirming our conclusion. She also told us that she had good ones in her cage (the space frame was full of locked cages with the good stuff) and we could come in and get them rather than the bad ones. As we didn’t mind the bad ones (usually out of spec but still very useful for our purposes). We declined the good devices.

I also found out that the Calculator department had a cage. In it were thousands of defective TMS1000 class devices (our part numbers were TMC01xx). We were storing them waiting for the Semiconductor department of TI to finally allow us to return bad parts which had been soldered and removed from a PC board.

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Source:  OpenStax, The speak n spell. OpenStax CNX. Jan 31, 2014 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11501/1.5
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