Transistor Museum Oral History Ralph Greenburg "Swimming with the Sharks" Page 3

EARLY TRANSISTOR HISTORY AT MOTOROLA

“SWIMMING WITH THE SHARKS” by Ralph Greenburg

As I set down one thought occurred to me, I COULD SWIM. The PHDs hadn’t eaten me alive. I have no idea what the lady engineer had to say about microwave antennas since I was occupied reviewing my talk and how to improve it.

Upon returning to Phoenix, I told Dr. Bottom that the talk had gone well and that almost everybody wanted more information. Dr. Bottom then surprised me by stating that a lot of changes were developing, Jack Hickey had arrived from Chicago to head up all of the semiconductor efforts, Motorola was going to sell its products on the open market and a marketing department was being formed which would include Application Engineering.

He also requested that I write a more comprehensive paper suitable for customer use. The paper, “Characteristics and Applications of Germanium Power Transistors.” was a big hit with the entire sales force since Jack Hickey told me so in a memo dated May 7, 1957. He stated “successful uses they are making of your recent paper on specifying a power transistor”. By the way the entire sales force were all of two people, Bill Blinoff and Jon Jolly.

And so for the next 15 years or so I had a swimmingly good time writing numerous Application Notes, Technical articles and Handbooks. There were also many customer visits and seminars some very interesting, but that’s another story.

In retrospect, I’m not sure Dr. Bottom had a schedule conflict and I wonder why he picked me to substitute rather than five or six other application engineers who knew as much or more than I did. Well I never will know.

I give thanks Dr. Bottom who never taught me to swim but rather pushed me in a direction where I had to do it myself. Dr. Bottom had enjoyed heading the research and development of semiconductor devices but did not want to be part of a production and marketing effort. He left Motorola for a Professorship teaching about rare earths at a small Texas College.

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A Transistor Museum™ History of Transistors Publication

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