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When I got out of college I
contacted him, but that was when things were falling apart at
Shockley. Engineering jobs were
scarce in 1958. I took a job with
Convair Astronautics for 6 months – I had a “moving clause” in my contract,
but at the end of that obligation, I was out of there. You know, one of 3000 engineers, on a
cost plus engineering assignment.
That was when I interviewed at both Hewlett Packard and Shockley
Transistor Corp. I had a bad interview with Barney Oliver at HP (maybe one
of us was having a bad day).
Anyway, by the time I got back to San Diego, Shockley had made me an
offer.
Who did you interview with at
Shockley?
I interviewed with Rudy
Biesele. He was the General manager
at Shockley at that time. I did have a few words with Shockley. This was the first part of 1959. Clevite hadn’t yet bought Shockley –
that occurred in 1960. (It was announced on April Fool’s Day, 1960).
What was your job
responsibility?
I came in as an applications
engineer, but I soon was wearing “many hats”. From applications I moved to testing and characterization of
4 layer diodes. I developed test
equipment for manufacturing and supported the R&D staff with electronic
instrumentation. With help from the
Clevite QA Department, I wrote the first mil-spec for a 4 layer diode,
circa 1961. Probably the most fun
was developing dynamic displays for trade show exhibits.
Go
To Weckler Oral History, Page 3
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