[time-nuts] HP Stories: The 5061B, from R&D to Manufacturing, and the ill-conceived 5061C

[Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems)]

Hello Time Nuts,

For those new to the "HP Stories" series, my first job at HP Santa Clara Division (SCD) , the home of Frequency and Time products, was being part of a two man development team upgrading the HP 5061A Cesium Beam Frequency Standard to the 5061B.    Sorry for not posting anything for a while;  about a month ago I relocated from Singapore to Penang Malaysia, transitioning from inkjet printers R&D to printhead manufacturing.   I now have to figure out how to build the stuff I have been inventing for the last 20 years.

This HP Story reflects on R&D vs. Manufacturing at HP Santa Clara Division in the mid 1980s.

In 1984, SCD R&D was a vibrant organization.   It employed a wide range of engineers from new hires like me, through senior engineers with 30 years of experience.     Robert Montesi and I made up the 5061B team, and were giving a home within the 5350/51/52 Microwave counter development team.  They affectionally called the 5350 counter family "Phred", after a character from the Doonesbury cartoon of the day.   About a dozen engineers worked on Phred, and when compared to the 5061B, whose roots dated back to 1965, Phred was state of the art.   Microprocessor controlled, back-lit LCD displays, full HPIB interface, and modern RF electronics for the up to 40GHz frequency measurements in the 5352.    Being unfamiliar with how firmware controlled microcontrollers can interface with electronics, I was in awe when I heard one of the experienced engineers talking about fixing a circuit issue with firmware.   How was this possible?  As far as I knew, fixing electronic problems involved component and PC layout changes.   I couldn't imagine how changing the program on a microcontroller would fix a circuit issue.    (In my inkjet printer world, we joke about how FW writes patched for all the messes that the HW people make.)

In addition to the HP 5350 family counters, there was development on Waveform recorders, the 5371A Modulation Domain Analyzer, exotic optics for the laser interferometers, and "Sandblaster", which I have mentioned before, a giant automated circuit test machine, similar to what Teradyne sells today.    (Sandblaster was canceled after a year or two of development.  I think it was just too much for SCD to bite off.)   All around us were hi-tech activities and equipment.   Lots of HP9836 desktop micro-computers with high resolution graphical monitors come to mind.     Overall, SCD R&D felt exciting and alive, with new inventions being created everywhere.    The 5061A -->B was just an incremental "fix-it" program, and didn't use any fancy computers or HPIB or anything.   But it was still cool, being the world's most accurate frequency standard outside of national laboratories.

As the 5061B development wrapped up in late 1985, my job transitioned to preparing the 5061B for production.   SCD R&D was in one building, and PFS (Precision Frequency Sources) production was in an adjacent building.   The walk across the 2nd story patio from one building to the other was like going through a time warp from 1985 to 1968, except the people in 1968 PFS production were now all old.     The manufacturing processes were largely unchanged from what was used to build the 5060A in 1965.   There was still a lot of "gray paint" HP test equipment around.   A 40 foot row of big, sturdy plywood topped work benches made the 5061A/B test area production "line".

The production area responsible for manufacturing the 5061B and associated products (5065A Rubidium standard, 105B quarts oscillator, distribution amplifies, 5087 battery backup, etc.) was staffed by two teams.   Dale, a no-nonsense middle aged man was the supervisor over the 5 or so electronic technicians (all men), and Miriam, a pleasant woman nearing retirement managed the 6 or 8 assemblers (all women) who put everything together for these complex products.   I was younger than everyone by at least 10 years; the token "engineer" who was supposed to show them (and document) how to build the 5061B.   However, this gang had been building Cesium standards for years, some going back to the 5060A in the 1960's, and I quickly understood they didn't need me training them.  My place in the hierarchy was clear.    To use an Army analogy, I was the young 2nd lieutenant on first assignment, surrounded by seasoned NCOs and battle hardened soldiers.    They treated fine and helped me to learn, but it was pretty obvious to everyone that I wasn't bringing a whole lot to the party, and had to earn any respect I would be given.

I did a bunch of things to simplify the wiring of the 5061, which was mildly appreciated by the assemblers.   They had become artist in hand soldering wires to terminal posts and legs of TO-3 power transistors and could weave the rats nest of wires around the chassis with their eyes closed.   No assembly procedures or documentation was ever referred to - they just knew how to make everything.   One assembler, a Japanese women about the age of my mother who did the most artful soldering,  approved of my change to remove the terminal posts (where the wires had be carefully wrapped several times and then soldered) and replaced with simple holes in a PCB, where you could just poke it the wire and fill with solder.      However, in my quest to update all the part numbers to modern preferred parts, I had updated the wire part numbers too, and the plastic insulation on the new preferred material didn't shrink like the old non-preferred wire, causing some issues for them.    She wasn't happy about the new wire.   "Sorry, we have to update it."      (When you have been making a product the same way for years, you tend to be irritated by any deviation.)

The women were very excited about me getting married about the time the 5061B was going into production.   I showed them a picture of my soon-to-be wife, and they gushed about how pretty she was, and chided me that we were too young to be getting married.  (22 and 23)   "So, how young were you when you got married?"  I asked.   "Tee-hee, ah, well, I was 19.   Giggle."    And then one of them would tell a mildly off color joke about how walking into their area was entering PMS alley.

30 feet away were the technicians.   All the classic, politically incorrect gender based stereotypes applied.   You had to really pry to get them to talk about anything personal, and they would grumble about everything, just to have something to talk about.    As you can imagine, they had an entirely different spin on what my future held after I got married.     But they knew their stuff, and were committed to making good products.     They allowed me to hang around the production line for weeks, and do all the operations to set up and "align" the 5061B myself, so I could see it firsthand.   As I learned the product, updated all the documentation and fixed nagging issues, they started giving me some respect.  I could feel that they didn't think I was a complete idiot any more.    You really knew they trusted and respected you when they would start including you in on the complaints about management or other engineers, making you feel like one of the guys.   It was cool.

The overall production manager was a woman name Betsy, and her husband Earl (or some vintage name like that) was a "Vacuum Tech" doing equipment maintenance in the Cesium Beam production area.   In their mid to late 50s, they were salt of the earth mid-western folk.  They had migrated to California from Nebraska a decade or two before.  After hanging sheet rock for a bit, they had hooked up with HP in entry level production roles.   I once asked Earl why they left farming in Nebraska.  "I got tired of being hungry."  It was his way of saying he got weary of  working his butt off as a farmer and making no money.   Over the years they had proven themselves and been promoted ,and HP had been very, very good to them.   From broke midwestern farmers to upper middle class Silicon Valley.  The American Dream embodied.

PFS had a large production area where the Cesium Beam tubes were made, in a series of closed in clean-ish rooms.  As an instrument guy, I rarely went in there, as the CBT was essentially a component to me.   This was Lou Mueller's domain, and he kept Earl busy upgrading equipment and improving processes.  They had their own crew of production assemblers and technicians.   (Lou once told a story about having to keep the gold wire under lock and key.   But the didn't worry about the Platinum, because  most people didn't pay any attention to it.  I just looked like ordinary wire.)   In the same area, the "physics package" for the Rubidium Frequency Reference was made, down to blowing exotic glass envelopes, about the size of a half-height a C-Battery, to contain the Rubidium gas.     The 10811 oscillator, still relatively new for PFS in 1986, was also built in the general area.   It was a lot more modern, and a couple of engineers were working to automate all the testing of the oscillators as they aged and stabilized after they were built.   Jim Collins was the quartz crystal guy, and continued to innovate on processes for making the 10811 crystals.   HP would by raw quartz, I think pre-sliced in the right "SC" crystal orientation, and then grind and polish and gold plate and package the little quarts disks, about the size of a nickel, to become the heart of the 10811 oscillator.   There was a lot of fancy large heavy equipment used in this process.   One staff member was in a process rooms during the famous 1989 San Francisco earthquake, which shook the SCD building pretty hard during afternoon work hours.   "Yeah, we didn't think it was necessary to bolt the mega grinder to the floor when we installed it, since the damn thing is so heavy.   During the shaking, it was walking across the room towards me.   Got me kind of nervous.)

There was a mix of other engineers support all this work, most of them a generation older than me.   I would often hear the joke:  "Once in PFS, always in PFS", as most had worked on this product line for 20+ years.    While the PFS products were well made, high performing and profitable, there was gloomy feeling hanging over the organization.    This most likely came from the lack of growth and investment in the product line.    As Rick Karlquist noted in a response to an earlier HP Story, HP was milking this cash cow.   There were no ideas for new products that would lead to enough new business to justify the investment.   We didn't even have an R&D department for the product line.   Our job was to keep building these old products and make money for HP to invest in some other growing business.   Our innovation opportunity was to improve quality and lower production costs.    Oddly, the overall people staffing was generous, as if they were expecting an upturn in orders some time soon.    In retrospect, I think this was an artifact of the old "HP Way" culture, where HP didn't ever lay anyone off.     SCD manufacturing had the capacity for twice the volume we had orders for, and every production department had more people than they needed.   The engineering team was not funded for tooling and capital needed to make big changes.  With heavy investment constraints, there just wasn't that much we could do.    Many of the engineers adopted the production team work hours:  6am start, morning break at 9am, 30 minute lunch break at 11:30, and leave at 2:20pm, taking the afternoon 10 minute break as you walked to your car.  (I dream of working those hours now!)

As I got the 5061B fully integrated into production and all the NPI paperwork caught up, I started to run out of things to do also.   I tried to keep myself busy helping Chuck Little teach Cesium Seminars, dealing with Sperry special orders, or finding a loose end somewhere to clean up.  But overall, I wasn't being challenged.  Well-meaning engineering managers would encourage me to spend a day a week doing circuit design of some kind.   "You should add HPIB to the 5061B!"  My thought:  What for?  So you can read the time on the clock display?      We would talk about modernizing some of the older circuit designs, but it was a challenge to figure out where to start.  The 5061B control system was spread over many modules, and it didn't make sense to just work on one part.  The whole thing needed to be integrated.

This launched me on my first attempt at system architecture.    I penciled out a weakly detailed plan to overhaul all the electronics in the 5061B.   The 10MHz RF side could be simplified and modernized, with the 10MHz --> 5MHz --> 10MHz mess streamlined.   Even more obvious, all the low frequency control circuits, 137Hz oscillator, Op-Am module, and Logic board could all be integrated into one module.    The benefit offered by all this circuit redesign and integration would be a major cost reduction, and perhaps a few hundred dollars per instrument could be saved.    The idea was essentially a 5061C.

Someone convinced me to pitch the idea to Rob Burgoon for feedback.   Rob was a senior EE in R&D, who had done a lot of the circuit design on the 5062C "mini Cesium" in the mid 1970s.  He was very smart, practical and experienced.   Rob was kind, and patiently listened to my idea.  He then asked a few penetrating questions.    "Who do you propose will do all this circuit design?"    "Uh, someone, maybe you, could do the RF stuff.   I would like to work on the low frequency circuits, but I would probably need some help."    I remember being embarrassed by the fact that I had completely ignored that real people, with names, had to be identified to do this work.   And they might be busy doing something else.   I wanted to work on it, but realistically was wholly unqualified.     He likely asked some questions about how much it might cost to do this redesign, an how much it would save.   And then how many 5061Cs we would have to sell before it showed a return.      Saving $300 is great, but on a $30,000 instrument, that we build < 200 a year of, it will take a long time to pay off.    Would HP sell more if we did this?  (No).   What was the HP motivation to making this investment?    (Giving me, and junior engineer, something interesting to do.)

And thus, my proposal for a 5061C, died on the drawing board.   Several years later, Len Cutler did sell an idea to management for a new Cesium Standard, the 5071A.  But this time architected by engineers like Rick Karlquist who actually know what they were doing.  And rather than being a simple cost reduction of an old product, it was a major breakthrough in performance, and likely did drive a lot of new sales.

In the meantime, I continued to kick around finding odd things here and there, and eventually started looking for a job outside of PFS.   That led to me moving to the Frequency Counter production engineering team, that I'll describe more in another HP Story.     And by moving on, I missed my chance to help with the 5071.  Although I am not sure what I would have been able to contribute, other than managing the NPI process.

Young engineers in the Inkjet world now come to me with their bright new ideas, and I am the old dude asking the penetrating questions.   "What business problem are you solving?   Why will we sell more printers?   How are you going to recover the cost this will add?  What makes you think your idea is possible?"  It is difficult to not crush their youthful enthusiasm too quickly.  But after I typically explain to them why their idea is fatally flawed, I add:    "We've had hundreds of the best engineers in the word working on inkjet printers for 30 years.  All the easy and obvious stuff was done a long time ago.   Don't feel bad, I'm having a hard time finding valuable innovations to propose too."   Oh, to have the energy of youth, and the wisdom of old age.  That would be nice.

Hopefully this has been a worthwhile read for you.


Hugh Rice