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Oral History – Ed Millis
(Continued)
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Two seconds later, after a bunch
of ratcheting sounds from stepping switches, one of the 108 plastic
drinking glasses would light up and the transistor would be tossed into
it. It was a swell machine except for one slight oversight on my part.
Only one person in the Lemmon Ave plant could change a burnt-out light bulb
in it, and that was Grace Weatherall, a lovely and petite secretary. Her
slim hand alone could reach through the drinking glass support hole and
unscrew the bulb. She was a very good sport about it, considering there
were six machines, each with 108 bulbs!
The problem of testing all the
transistors TI was cranking out was beginning to be a major headache. The
testing system was unchanged from the beginning of production several years
before. Each separate test for a transistor required a test box and an
operator to run it. The test box told the operator if the transistor was
good or bad, or occasionally, what range of goodness it was in. So there
were a lot of test boxes on a lot of tables with a lot of operators passing
transistors from one to the other. And we, in the test equipment group,
were drowning in orders for more test boxes. Things were going to get
worse before they got better. So we began brainstorming about this test
problem and developed an idea for a modular test machine that would be
built up like tinker toys – just keep adding on what you needed. It could
have almost any number of testing stations and sorting stations.
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Oral History – Ed Millis
(Continued)
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Each transistor would ride in
its own little test block through testing stations until it came to a
sorting station that checked the results of the tests and decided if it
qualified for selection. If it did, the transistor would be pulled from
the block and put into a bucket. A punched paper card travelled with the
test block, keeping track of the passing and failing of each test. The
sorting station would look at the array of holes and decide the
transistor’s fate. We had pretty much worked out the details of how we
thought the system ought to be built, but Jim called one last meeting
before putting together a proposal to management. We needed to think of a
name for it. We argued for an hour with no particular progress until Earl
“Mac” McDonald, a terrific test set builder, declared, “How about
‘Centralized Automatic Tester?’. We could call it the CAT machine.” We
all liked that a lot and the name was adopted. It lasted a long, long
time. Although not immediately accepted by management, this CAT system soon
became the standard for all TI transistor production testing. We couldn’t
build them fast enough. With CAT’s, and in 1961 the Super CAT’s, TI was
able to greatly expand the volume of transistors that could be manufactured
and tested. The CAT and Super CAT probably had more impact on the
production of transistors at TI than any machines our group designed.
______________
Millis
Oral History, Page 5
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