Some Silicon Forest History
Adapted from an email to a Wanderer (a group that has been meeting in the Linus Pauling House).
Dr. D. (Dave DiNucci) and I and his Silicon Valley friend Eugene (visiting PDX), recently toured VintageTEK for the first time, the Tektronix campus based museum open one day a week. Lots of oscilloscopes on display, their principal product over the decades, but by no means their only one. Here’s an album from our visit:
Tek started, in terms of personnel if not name (yet), on SE Foster. I’ve pinpointed the building. Then it moved to Hawthorne. Hewlett-Packard and Electro-scientific Instruments (ESI) were two other anchoring Silicon Forest businesses that became huge, giving our region its name and reputation. Intel is another.
ESI is the one to study vs-a-vs Wanderers, as its founder Doug Strain was a pacifist and admirer of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which was / is a Quaker social action organization.
When ESI was ready to move to a bigger facility on Macadam, Doug wanted to donate the building to AFSC, but said nonprofit wasn’t set up to receive whole buildings as donations, but it worked out to give the building to a new Quaker meeting which in turn would give AFSC the office space it needed (and eventually outgrew). The Quakers have since greatly remodeled and expanded Doug’s factory, which belonged to Jantzen before it was an ESI device factory.
There’s a footnote wherein the Macadam facility caught fire on the night of the fireman’s ball, meaning no firefighters showed up in time to keep it from burning to the ground. I’m pretty sure they had to move back to Stark Street at that point.
Here’s an album from Doug Strain’s memorial service:
He endowed a lot of stuff at Pacific University in Forest Grove, which is where the service happened.
Doug had been a student of Linus Pauling’s at CalTech. Linus was also a pacifist-scientist-engineer. When Terry Bristol, already running ISEPP and a lecture series, found out the Linus Pauling boyhood home was in danger of demolition, he worked out a deal with Doug Strain to purchase the properties, and give ISEPP office space therein. One of Terry’s dreams was to keep acquiring more properties on that block and build a campus, an institution. That part was a pipedream, but then hey, some pipedreams come true.
A breakthrough I experienced at VintageTEK was finding pictures of a military award service for Tektronix founder Howard Vollum, who’d been to Reed College before entering the military. The ceremony at Fort Evans featured DDUs, Dymaxion Deployment Units. Aha! A link to Bucky and the Bucky stuff from the heart of the Silicon Forest. I can use that going forward, as a kind of 2-way segue. I think in terms of hypertoons (curriculum = spaghetti ball of smoothly interconnecting scenarios).
The Linus and Ava Helen Archive is housed at OSU. Ditto one of the Bucky Fuller archives, the one by Trevor Blake inheriting from Joe Moore.
The main Bucky Fuller archives, the actual Chronofile he amassed over a lifetime, is at Stanford.
