Long life products, obsolete components, and code 4 parts. RE: HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering. A major task was dealing with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of semiconductors and integrated circuits.
In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” – Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had the frequency counter product line. I managed the production engineering team for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D engineering new hire interview to qualify for. This technology was invented in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about 1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to mind. We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper counters for sale. But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our customers. The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old units. I recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond: “Tell me how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.” The manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say: “Our margins are well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our salaries. Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.” Turns out that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we kept building and selling them.
The PFS products were similar in this regard. The product line had largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but prices and margins were high. Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production, but the development was done, and it was good money. HP was a business after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs. The was a great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be a cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was profitable, and preferably growing. Nothing was guaranteed.
HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we were designing our products for long production lives and low materials management overhead costs. Code 1 was best. Industry standard parts available from many sources cheaply. Code 2 were OK to use. Code 3 was something really special, and needed a good reason to include. Code 4 brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant management review.
The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted component was a life time buy. The Materials group hated this, because they had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys. What if they get lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted longer than we expected? A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per year, was a typical challenge. 10 more years of life? Buy 2400 parts? Perhaps double it to 5000 parts. The response from component buyers was easy to predict: “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor. We’re not tying up $10K in one part. We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t afford all this inventory.” So we would try harder. Maybe a 2N222A, or a 2N3904 will work. Procurements loves these parts. We’d try them out, and hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification. New parts never had the same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and design intent documentation non-existent. I bet half the time the old transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969, worked fine, and he just used it. The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to discourage this kind of design thinking.
When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85, the primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code 4 parts. Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing with vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on. Our attitude was trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was already over 20 years old. We had a history of selling PFS instruments for decades, and we were preparing for decades more.
Bob kb8tq wrote: “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.”
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could), and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement time-nuts@lists.febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
Hi
Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….
Bob
On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.netmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net> wrote:
On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it goes away, how
many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the
planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.
EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case there's some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem happens early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's EOL, and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their widget using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using spare parts bought by original Mission A.
I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in 1997) in things like breadboards at work.
On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.netmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net> wrote:
and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There are lots of
parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only", and when
they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a part. The
usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date - lifetime
buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has purchased them, or
maybe only purchased significant quantities.
If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what you expect
to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover something like
the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a few years
warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign that section.
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Dear Hugh,
Many thanks for another nice post from the good old times.
Was a nice morning reading.
I didn't know that the 5061B was rebuilt with removing odd parts in
mind, but it makes sense. Interesting system with Code 1 to Code 4.
Cheers,
Magnus
On 12/29/18 5:36 AM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering. A major task was dealing with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of semiconductors and integrated circuits.
In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” – Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had the frequency counter product line. I managed the production engineering team for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D engineering new hire interview to qualify for. This technology was invented in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about 1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to mind. We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper counters for sale. But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our customers. The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old units. I recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond: “Tell me how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.” The manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say: “Our margins are well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our salaries. Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.” Turns out that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we kept building and selling them.
The PFS products were similar in this regard. The product line had largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but prices and margins were high. Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production, but the development was done, and it was good money. HP was a business after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs. The was a great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be a cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was profitable, and preferably growing. Nothing was guaranteed.
HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we were designing our products for long production lives and low materials management overhead costs. Code 1 was best. Industry standard parts available from many sources cheaply. Code 2 were OK to use. Code 3 was something really special, and needed a good reason to include. Code 4 brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant management review.
The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted component was a life time buy. The Materials group hated this, because they had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys. What if they get lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted longer than we expected? A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per year, was a typical challenge. 10 more years of life? Buy 2400 parts? Perhaps double it to 5000 parts. The response from component buyers was easy to predict: “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor. We’re not tying up $10K in one part. We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t afford all this inventory.” So we would try harder. Maybe a 2N222A, or a 2N3904 will work. Procurements loves these parts. We’d try them out, and hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification. New parts never had the same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and design intent documentation non-existent. I bet half the time the old transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969, worked fine, and he just used it. The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to discourage this kind of design thinking.
When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85, the primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code 4 parts. Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing with vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on. Our attitude was trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was already over 20 years old. We had a history of selling PFS instruments for decades, and we were preparing for decades more.
Bob kb8tq wrote: “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.”
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could), and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement time-nuts@lists.febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
Hi
Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….
Bob
On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.netmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net> wrote:
On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it goes away, how
many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the
planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.
EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case there's some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem happens early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's EOL, and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their widget using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using spare parts bought by original Mission A.
I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in 1997) in things like breadboards at work.
On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.netmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net> wrote:
and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There are lots of
parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only", and when
they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a part. The
usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date - lifetime
buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has purchased them, or
maybe only purchased significant quantities.
If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what you expect
to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover something like
the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a few years
warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign that section.
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The HP way (AFAIK) was as follows:
They were making the 5061A and the
default philosophy was don't fix it
if it ain't broke. However, products
reach a tipping point. In the case
of the 5061A, the obsolescence of the
Nixie tube was the straw that broke
the camel's back. But there were a
bunch of other issues that had also
accumulated a critical mass.
I was hired into HP in 1979 to work in the
Precision Frequency Sources R&D section
to work on the 10816 rubidium. That
project was eventually cancelled by a "new sheriff
in town" event upstairs, and took the
section with it. So they had to somehow
boot leg the 61B without an R&D section.
A production engineer
named Robert (I forgot his last name) was
the project manager. He basically tried
to keep his head down and not attract a
lot of attention. I am thinking that all
the money came out of the production engineering
budget.
Another HP way thing is that we would
go from A to B in order to get the clock
running on the end of support life. Upper
management would be not be suspicious of an
A to B, as opposed to a new product number,
which would be a red flag. The cesium line was
to be run as a cash cow, period. Len pulled a
rabbit out of the hat when he got permission for
the 5071A.
So the 61B was a bridge product to keep the
plane flying until the 71A came out. It
basically contained no gratuitous improvements,
only stuff that had to be fixed.
Rick
On 12/30/2018 5:23 AM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
Dear Hugh,
Many thanks for another nice post from the good old times.
Was a nice morning reading.
I didn't know that the 5061B was rebuilt with removing odd parts in
mind, but it makes sense. Interesting system with Code 1 to Code 4.
Cheers,
Magnus
On 12/29/18 5:36 AM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering. A major task was dealing with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of semiconductors and integrated circuits.
In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” – Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had the frequency counter product line. I managed the production engineering team for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D engineering new hire interview to qualify for. This technology was invented in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about 1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to mind. We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper counters for sale. But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our customers. The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old units. I recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond: “Tell me how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.” The manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say: “Our margins are well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our salaries. Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.” Turns out that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we kept building and selling them.
The PFS products were similar in this regard. The product line had largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but prices and margins were high. Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production, but the development was done, and it was good money. HP was a business after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs. The was a great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be a cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was profitable, and preferably growing. Nothing was guaranteed.
HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we were designing our products for long production lives and low materials management overhead costs. Code 1 was best. Industry standard parts available from many sources cheaply. Code 2 were OK to use. Code 3 was something really special, and needed a good reason to include. Code 4 brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant management review.
The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted component was a life time buy. The Materials group hated this, because they had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys. What if they get lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted longer than we expected? A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per year, was a typical challenge. 10 more years of life? Buy 2400 parts? Perhaps double it to 5000 parts. The response from component buyers was easy to predict: “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor. We’re not tying up $10K in one part. We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t afford all this inventory.” So we would try harder. Maybe a 2N222A, or a 2N3904 will work. Procurements loves these parts. We’d try them out, and hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification. New parts never had the same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and design intent documentation non-existent. I bet half the time the old transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969, worked fine, and he just used it. The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to discourage this kind of design thinking.
When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85, the primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code 4 parts. Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing with vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on. Our attitude was trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was already over 20 years old. We had a history of selling PFS instruments for decades, and we were preparing for decades more.
Bob kb8tq wrote: “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.”
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could), and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement time-nuts@lists.febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
Hi
Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….
Bob
On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.netmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net> wrote:
On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it goes away, how
many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the
planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.
EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case there's some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem happens early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's EOL, and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their widget using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using spare parts bought by original Mission A.
I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in 1997) in things like breadboards at work.
On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.netmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net> wrote:
and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There are lots of
parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only", and when
they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a part. The
usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date - lifetime
buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has purchased them, or
maybe only purchased significant quantities.
If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what you expect
to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover something like
the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a few years
warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign that section.
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On 12/28/2018 8:36 PM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could), and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
Even in the late 1980's when the 5071A project started,
the handwriting was on the wall with respect to GPS.
It seemed like cesium was going to be a niche product.
OTOH, Len's vision was that after the 5071A we would
do an optically pumped version. So it could be said
that no one expected the 5071A to last 25 years. What
changed was:
-
Len never got permission to do an optically pumped
version. The people at Microchip tell me that even now,
they can't get reliable laser diodes. Optical pumping
is limited to laboratory standards, not COTS ones. -
I am shocked! to report that GPS can be spoofed or
jammed :-). Now every military commander wants his own
cesium.
An anecdote about life time buys:
When I designed the 5071A, HP had their own SAW fab.
This was when HP made their own coax, transformers, etc.
They already had a 640 MHz SAWR that was used in the
11729, so I designed it into the 5071A and phase locked
it to the 10811. Then we got the news about the SAW fab.
The managers patted themselves on the back for arranging
with SAWTEK to support the SAW products. However, that
referred to SAWTEK selling us only complete oscillators
for $300. Not loose resonators. BTW, Jack Kusters
developed the original SAW technology.
So I started work on a new RF module without a SAW, and
meanwhile purchasing made a life time buy. Long before
the inventory was used up, I released a new RF module
that was one PC board that replaced the old on with two
PC boards and had a factory cost that was $100 lower.
The production engineers loved the module because it
just worked from the get go. It contained five cascaded
doublers that went from 10 MHz to 320 MHz. Previous
multiplier chains going from 10 MHz to 90 MHz constituted
a full employment program for production engineers. With
the 5071A design, I never heard from production about any
problems.
I assumed that they would immediately implement this change
because they were basically shipping a $100 bill with
each instrument. But they said, no, they would have to
write off the life time buy inventory and "lose" money.
I tried to explain "sunk cost" to them to no avail. So
they kept shipping the old design until the last SAWR
was used up. Go figure.
Robin Gifford of 5071A fame used to talk about his professor
who had a very old tank of helium that was acquired when helium
was very expensive. It was carried on the books at its
"book" price which was the historical cost. The professor
would order new helium tanks to avoid using up the "expensive"
helium. Robin loved debunking nonsense. He had a subtle
but devastating English sense of humor.
Rick
I’ll add a bit to Rick’s story, from my manufacturing engineering perspective.
I was hired into PFS manufacturing engineering in 1984, specifically to work with Roberto (Robert) Montesi on the 5061B product. Roberto was the production engineer on the 5061A, and acting “project manager” of our little two man development team. We were funded by manufacturing, as Rick noted, but sat in the R&D lab for about 18 months as we redesigned (updated) a bunch of stuff on the 5061A.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Roberto was a very good engineer (compared to me at least), and a great mentor. One story he told me about himself that I recall: He was originally from Nicaragua, and somehow wound up in the US Army during Vietnam, spending some time in combat there as a GI. At one point the Army wanted to send him to officers candidate school, since he scored so well on all the tests. He was a smart guy, with perfect English. Well into the process, they finally realized that he wasn’t a US citizen, and thus couldn’t be an officer. He seemed to make it through the whole Vietnam experience with minimal PTSD (as far as I could tell), and would tell an interesting (and likely cynical) war story now an then. Like Rick said, Roberto kept his head down, and we sat in a shared work area and did our 5061B thing, surrounded by the team working on the new 5350,51,52 microwave counters, led by their very energetic project manager Bob Renner. The real R&D guys treated us well, even though we were 2nd class production guys. (Not too many years before this, R&D engineers and production engineers were not on the same pay scale, and really were second class in HP eyes. The feeling of not being a “full” engineer still lingered in 1984.)
As Rick said, PFS products like the cesium standards were cash cow products, and didn’t have a R&D staff at all. All the “upgrades” were funded by manufacturing, to keep this product line viable. The whole development effort was about extending the production life of the 5061A. We were selling about 15/month, with an average price of about $35K. The gross margins were very high (sales price – material costs), and the product line delivered 4 or 5 million in gross profits to the division a year. It was well worth having a couple of manufacturing engineers freshen things up to keep this cow healthy. And Roberto was still the production engineer for the 5061A during this time, so kinda doing double duty.
My job on the 5061B was to redesign the clock display and the battery charger. These were both part of the popular time-keeping option 003, which was primarily the 1pps output circuit. The battery backup was to prevent the 1PPS signal from losing syc. If there was a power interruption. I recall the battery charger had a huge mica capacitor that couldn’t be purchased any more, and a crazy design with obscure TTL counters. The clock display was even crazier. Not nixie tubes, but two or three circular PC boards driving LED displays, and again obscure ICs that were hard to procure. Hard to build, and really expensive. (More on these in another story on another day.)
Roberto redesigned the frequency divider module (5MHz in; 10MHz, 1MHz, 100kHz out – another odd design rooted in 5060 history), the A3 power regulator board, and some stuff internal to one (both?) of the high voltage power supplies, used for the Ion Pump and Electron Multiplier. Maybe some other things too. For all of these, obsolete components was the driving force.
By 1984 standards, there were some really crazy circuits still in the instrument (still another story for another day), but as Rick said, in low volume manufacturing, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. In the case of the 5061, don’t even think about touching it.
Rick’s memory of the management dynamics are similar to mine. A 5061A to 5061B “upgrade”, particularly if funded by manufacturing, was easy to get approved. Entire new developments were hard to justify. The division was under a lot of financial stress in the 1980s. Peace was breaking out as the cold war was winding down, and DOD spending, which drove a lot of instrumentation sales, was shrinking. Digital oscilloscopes and synthesized frequency generators were obsoleting the need for frequency counters, the majority of the divisions revenue. PFS was profitable, but zero growth. We also build laser interferometers, which did amazing high precision displacement measurements, but they weren’t growing either. While profitable, the division revenue was shrinking maybe 10% per year. In the 8 years I was there, headcount went from about 1500 to 500 people. Management was desperate to fund new products that would lead to growth. I recall the general manager at the time (Jim Horner), having a metric for every new development on how much growth it would contribute to the division. It was never enough. Redesigning the 5061A yielded zero growth (the demand for cesium standards was pretty flat) and thus not a priority. A very light touch by manufacturing to keep it viable was appropriate.
This email chain has unleashed a flood of memories from 30 years ago. Hopefully a few of you find this walk down memory lane interesting. I have a few more stories in the que if any of you are still interested.
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com On Behalf Of Richard (Rick) Karlquist
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 7:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement time-nuts@lists.febo.com; Magnus Danielson magnus@rubidium.dyndns.org
Cc: magnus@rubidium.se
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Long life products, obsolete components, and code 4 parts. RE: HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
The HP way (AFAIK) was as follows:
They were making the 5061A and the
default philosophy was don't fix it
if it ain't broke. However, products
reach a tipping point. In the case
of the 5061A, the obsolescence of the
Nixie tube was the straw that broke
the camel's back. But there were a
bunch of other issues that had also
accumulated a critical mass.
I was hired into HP in 1979 to work in the
Precision Frequency Sources R&D section
to work on the 10816 rubidium. That
project was eventually cancelled by a "new sheriff
in town" event upstairs, and took the
section with it. So they had to somehow
boot leg the 61B without an R&D section.
A production engineer
named Robert (I forgot his last name) was
the project manager. He basically tried
to keep his head down and not attract a
lot of attention. I am thinking that all
the money came out of the production engineering
budget.
Another HP way thing is that we would
go from A to B in order to get the clock
running on the end of support life. Upper
management would be not be suspicious of an
A to B, as opposed to a new product number,
which would be a red flag. The cesium line was
to be run as a cash cow, period. Len pulled a
rabbit out of the hat when he got permission for
the 5071A.
So the 61B was a bridge product to keep the
plane flying until the 71A came out. It
basically contained no gratuitous improvements,
only stuff that had to be fixed.
Rick
On 12/30/2018 5:23 AM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
Dear Hugh,
Many thanks for another nice post from the good old times.
Was a nice morning reading.
I didn't know that the 5061B was rebuilt with removing odd parts in
mind, but it makes sense. Interesting system with Code 1 to Code 4.
Cheers,
Magnus
On 12/29/18 5:36 AM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering. A major task was dealing with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of semiconductors and integrated circuits.
In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” – Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had the frequency counter product line. I managed the production engineering team for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D engineering new hire interview to qualify for. This technology was invented in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about 1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to mind. We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper counters for sale. But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our customers. The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old units. I recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond: “Tell me how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.” The manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say: “Our margins are well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our salaries. Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.” Turns out that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we kept building and selling them.
The PFS products were similar in this regard. The product line had largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but prices and margins were high. Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production, but the development was done, and it was good money. HP was a business after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs. The was a great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be a cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was profitable, and preferably growing. Nothing was guaranteed.
HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we were designing our products for long production lives and low materials management overhead costs. Code 1 was best. Industry standard parts available from many sources cheaply. Code 2 were OK to use. Code 3 was something really special, and needed a good reason to include. Code 4 brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant management review.
The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted component was a life time buy. The Materials group hated this, because they had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys. What if they get lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted longer than we expected? A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per year, was a typical challenge. 10 more years of life? Buy 2400 parts? Perhaps double it to 5000 parts. The response from component buyers was easy to predict: “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor. We’re not tying up $10K in one part. We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t afford all this inventory.” So we would try harder. Maybe a 2N222A, or a 2N3904 will work. Procurements loves these parts. We’d try them out, and hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification. New parts never had the same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and design intent documentation non-existent. I bet half the time the old transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969, worked fine, and he just used it. The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to discourage this kind of design thinking.
When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85, the primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code 4 parts. Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing with vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on. Our attitude was trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was already over 20 years old. We had a history of selling PFS instruments for decades, and we were preparing for decades more.
Bob kb8tq wrote: “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.”
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could), and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts <time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.commailto:time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com> On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <time-nuts@lists.febo.commailto:time-nuts@lists.febo.com>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
Hi
Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….
Bob
On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux@earthlink.netmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net%3cmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net>> wrote:
On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it goes away, how
many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the
planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.
EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case there's some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem happens early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's EOL, and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their widget using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using spare parts bought by original Mission A.
I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in 1997) in things like breadboards at work.
On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.net<mailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.netmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net%3cmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net>> wrote:
jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux@earthlink.netmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net%3cmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net> said:
and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There are lots of
parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only", and when
they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a part. The
usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date - lifetime
buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has purchased them, or
maybe only purchased significant quantities.
If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what you expect
to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover something like
the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a few years
warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign that section.
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This email chain has unleashed a flood of memories from 30 years ago.
Hopefully a few of you find this walk down memory lane interesting.
I have a few more stories in the que if any of you are still interested.
Hugh Rice
Somewhere in my library I have an internal hp document describing all the changes between the 5061 A and B. I remember a number of the changes were influenced by feedback from the repair group. So the design was driven not only by manufacturability, but also serviceability.
By the time the 5061B came out there was a decade or two of field experience with portable cesium clocks and this was put to good use. If you have this document it would be worth scanning. If not, I'll try to find the box where my copy is hiding.
Yes, keep the stories coming. They are very much appreciated.
Thanks,
/tvb
Hugh,
On 12/30/2018 10:19 PM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
This email chain has unleashed a flood of memories from 30 years ago. Hopefully a few of you find this walk down memory lane interesting. I have a few more stories in the que if any of you are still interested.
I enjoy these stories very much. I was an HP VAR during that time
period and would love to hear more.
Cheers,
Dan
Hi,
On 12/31/18 7:31 AM, Tom Van Baak wrote:
This email chain has unleashed a flood of memories from 30 years ago.
Hopefully a few of you find this walk down memory lane interesting.
I have a few more stories in the que if any of you are still interested.
Hugh Rice
Somewhere in my library I have an internal hp document describing all the changes between the 5061 A and B. I remember a number of the changes were influenced by feedback from the repair group. So the design was driven not only by manufacturability, but also serviceability.
By the time the 5061B came out there was a decade or two of field experience with portable cesium clocks and this was put to good use. If you have this document it would be worth scanning. If not, I'll try to find the box where my copy is hiding.
In usual HP style, minor fixes was surely introduced stepwise to reduce
returns or fix common enough issues.
Yes, keep the stories coming. They are very much appreciated.
Indeed, very nice reading from both Hugh and Rick here.
Cheers,
Magnus
hello to the group.
I really am enjoying the stories and in reality history about a great
company that I am very proud to actually own a lot of its technology.
Though purchased for $/lbs at hamfests and such. All needing TLC and all of
it teaching me more then a few lessons on how to do things.
So though the stories center around real world trade offs. The fact is the
guts were still very good. Says the guy with home brew crystal references.
Chuckle.
My one and only story was circa 1994-98 and video. Was at HP to see demos
of their video server. Always thought it would be a great place to work.
But going through the sea of cubes and seeing what it would actually be
like settled that forever.
Keep up the stories please.
Regards
Paul
WB8TSL
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 12:37 AM Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) <
hugh.rice@hp.com> wrote:
I’ll add a bit to Rick’s story, from my manufacturing engineering
perspective.
I was hired into PFS manufacturing engineering in 1984, specifically to
work with Roberto (Robert) Montesi on the 5061B product. Roberto was the
production engineer on the 5061A, and acting “project manager” of our
little two man development team. We were funded by manufacturing, as Rick
noted, but sat in the R&D lab for about 18 months as we redesigned
(updated) a bunch of stuff on the 5061A.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Roberto was a very good engineer (compared
to me at least), and a great mentor. One story he told me about himself
that I recall: He was originally from Nicaragua, and somehow wound up in
the US Army during Vietnam, spending some time in combat there as a GI.
At one point the Army wanted to send him to officers candidate school,
since he scored so well on all the tests. He was a smart guy, with
perfect English. Well into the process, they finally realized that he
wasn’t a US citizen, and thus couldn’t be an officer. He seemed to make
it through the whole Vietnam experience with minimal PTSD (as far as I
could tell), and would tell an interesting (and likely cynical) war story
now an then. Like Rick said, Roberto kept his head down, and we sat in a
shared work area and did our 5061B thing, surrounded by the team working on
the new 5350,51,52 microwave counters, led by their very energetic project
manager Bob Renner. The real R&D guys treated us well, even though we
were 2nd class production guys. (Not too many years before this, R&D
engineers and production engineers were not on the same pay scale, and
really were second class in HP eyes. The feeling of not being a “full”
engineer still lingered in 1984.)
As Rick said, PFS products like the cesium standards were cash cow
products, and didn’t have a R&D staff at all. All the “upgrades” were
funded by manufacturing, to keep this product line viable. The whole
development effort was about extending the production life of the 5061A.
We were selling about 15/month, with an average price of about $35K. The
gross margins were very high (sales price – material costs), and the
product line delivered 4 or 5 million in gross profits to the division a
year. It was well worth having a couple of manufacturing engineers
freshen things up to keep this cow healthy. And Roberto was still the
production engineer for the 5061A during this time, so kinda doing double
duty.
My job on the 5061B was to redesign the clock display and the battery
charger. These were both part of the popular time-keeping option 003,
which was primarily the 1pps output circuit. The battery backup was to
prevent the 1PPS signal from losing syc. If there was a power
interruption. I recall the battery charger had a huge mica capacitor that
couldn’t be purchased any more, and a crazy design with obscure TTL
counters. The clock display was even crazier. Not nixie tubes, but two
or three circular PC boards driving LED displays, and again obscure ICs
that were hard to procure. Hard to build, and really expensive. (More
on these in another story on another day.)
Roberto redesigned the frequency divider module (5MHz in; 10MHz, 1MHz,
100kHz out – another odd design rooted in 5060 history), the A3 power
regulator board, and some stuff internal to one (both?) of the high voltage
power supplies, used for the Ion Pump and Electron Multiplier. Maybe some
other things too. For all of these, obsolete components was the driving
force.
By 1984 standards, there were some really crazy circuits still in the
instrument (still another story for another day), but as Rick said, in low
volume manufacturing, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. In the case of the
5061, don’t even think about touching it.
Rick’s memory of the management dynamics are similar to mine. A 5061A to
5061B “upgrade”, particularly if funded by manufacturing, was easy to get
approved. Entire new developments were hard to justify. The division
was under a lot of financial stress in the 1980s. Peace was breaking out
as the cold war was winding down, and DOD spending, which drove a lot of
instrumentation sales, was shrinking. Digital oscilloscopes and
synthesized frequency generators were obsoleting the need for frequency
counters, the majority of the divisions revenue. PFS was profitable, but
zero growth. We also build laser interferometers, which did amazing high
precision displacement measurements, but they weren’t growing either.
While profitable, the division revenue was shrinking maybe 10% per year.
In the 8 years I was there, headcount went from about 1500 to 500
people. Management was desperate to fund new products that would lead to
growth. I recall the general manager at the time (Jim Horner), having a
metric for every new development on how much growth it would contribute to
the division. It was never enough. Redesigning the 5061A yielded zero
growth (the demand for cesium standards was pretty flat) and thus not a
priority. A very light touch by manufacturing to keep it viable was
appropriate.
This email chain has unleashed a flood of memories from 30 years ago.
Hopefully a few of you find this walk down memory lane interesting. I
have a few more stories in the que if any of you are still interested.
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com On Behalf Of Richard
(Rick) Karlquist
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 7:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <
time-nuts@lists.febo.com>; Magnus Danielson magnus@rubidium.dyndns.org
Cc: magnus@rubidium.se
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Long life products, obsolete components, and code
4 parts. RE: HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale,
the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
The HP way (AFAIK) was as follows:
They were making the 5061A and the
default philosophy was don't fix it
if it ain't broke. However, products
reach a tipping point. In the case
of the 5061A, the obsolescence of the
Nixie tube was the straw that broke
the camel's back. But there were a
bunch of other issues that had also
accumulated a critical mass.
I was hired into HP in 1979 to work in the
Precision Frequency Sources R&D section
to work on the 10816 rubidium. That
project was eventually cancelled by a "new sheriff
in town" event upstairs, and took the
section with it. So they had to somehow
boot leg the 61B without an R&D section.
A production engineer
named Robert (I forgot his last name) was
the project manager. He basically tried
to keep his head down and not attract a
lot of attention. I am thinking that all
the money came out of the production engineering
budget.
Another HP way thing is that we would
go from A to B in order to get the clock
running on the end of support life. Upper
management would be not be suspicious of an
A to B, as opposed to a new product number,
which would be a red flag. The cesium line was
to be run as a cash cow, period. Len pulled a
rabbit out of the hat when he got permission for
the 5071A.
So the 61B was a bridge product to keep the
plane flying until the 71A came out. It
basically contained no gratuitous improvements,
only stuff that had to be fixed.
Rick
On 12/30/2018 5:23 AM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
Dear Hugh,
Many thanks for another nice post from the good old times.
Was a nice morning reading.
I didn't know that the 5061B was rebuilt with removing odd parts in
mind, but it makes sense. Interesting system with Code 1 to Code 4.
Cheers,
Magnus
On 12/29/18 5:36 AM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in
manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering. A major task was dealing
with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products
had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of
semiconductors and integrated circuits.
In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” –
Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had the
frequency counter product line. I managed the production engineering team
for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D
engineering new hire interview to qualify for. This technology was invented
in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were
shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about
1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to mind.
We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper counters
for sale. But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into
some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was
more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our customers.
The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old units. I
recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about
obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond: “Tell me
how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.” The
manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say: “Our margins are
well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our
salaries. Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.” Turns out
that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we
kept building and selling them.
The PFS products were similar in this regard. The product line had
largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but prices
and margins were high. Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production,
but the development was done, and it was good money. HP was a business
after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs. The was a
great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be a
cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was
profitable, and preferably growing. Nothing was guaranteed.
HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we
were designing our products for long production lives and low materials
management overhead costs. Code 1 was best. Industry standard parts
available from many sources cheaply. Code 2 were OK to use. Code 3 was
something really special, and needed a good reason to include. Code 4
brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant
management review.
The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted
component was a life time buy. The Materials group hated this, because they
had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys. What if they get
lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted
longer than we expected? A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per year,
was a typical challenge. 10 more years of life? Buy 2400 parts? Perhaps
double it to 5000 parts. The response from component buyers was easy to
predict: “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor. We’re not
tying up $10K in one part. We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t
afford all this inventory.” So we would try harder. Maybe a 2N222A, or a
2N3904 will work. Procurements loves these parts. We’d try them out, and
hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification. New parts never had the
same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and
design intent documentation non-existent. I bet half the time the old
transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969, worked
fine, and he just used it. The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to
discourage this kind of design thinking.
When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85, the
primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code 4 parts.
Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in
component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing with
vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on. Our attitude was
trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was
already over 20 years old. We had a history of selling PFS instruments for
decades, and we were preparing for decades more.
Bob kb8tq wrote: “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand
of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago that
it still would be in production today.”
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could),
and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production
engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for
decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get
redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt
it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts <time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com<mailto:
time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com>> On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International
Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
Hi
Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the
engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….
Bob
On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:
jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux@earthlink.net%
3cmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net>>> wrote:
On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it
goes away, how
many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that
nobody on the
planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in
production today.
EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building
one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole
aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and
it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you
give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or
test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but
pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus
enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case there's
some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem happens
early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of
desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way
from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's EOL,
and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you
buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part
X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their widget
using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C
does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using spare
parts bought by original Mission A.
I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in
- in things like breadboards at work.
On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.net
<mailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net<mailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net%
3cmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net>>> wrote:
jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:
jimlux@earthlink.net%3cmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net>> said:
and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There are
lots of
parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only",
and when
they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a
part. The
usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date -
lifetime
buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has purchased
them, or
maybe only purchased significant quantities.
If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what
you expect
to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover
something like
the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a
few years
warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign
that section.
time-nuts@lists.febo.com<mailto:time-nuts@lists.febo.com%
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Time-standard based stories are probably on-topic, but for those wanting a
wider range of subjects without posting to the list,
http://hpmemoryproject.org/ has good stuff. And, of course, the
http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/journal.html
Tek produced a book :
https://www.radiomuseum.org/lf/b/winning-with-people-the-first-40-years-of-tektronix/
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 3:40 PM paul swed paulswedb@gmail.com wrote:
hello to the group.
I really am enjoying the stories and in reality history about a great
company that I am very proud to actually own a lot of its technology.
Though purchased for $/lbs at hamfests and such. All needing TLC and all of
it teaching me more then a few lessons on how to do things.
So though the stories center around real world trade offs. The fact is the
guts were still very good. Says the guy with home brew crystal references.
Chuckle.
My one and only story was circa 1994-98 and video. Was at HP to see demos
of their video server. Always thought it would be a great place to work.
But going through the sea of cubes and seeing what it would actually be
like settled that forever.
Keep up the stories please.
Regards
Paul
WB8TSL
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 12:37 AM Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) <
hugh.rice@hp.com> wrote:
I’ll add a bit to Rick’s story, from my manufacturing engineering
perspective.
I was hired into PFS manufacturing engineering in 1984, specifically to
work with Roberto (Robert) Montesi on the 5061B product. Roberto was
the
production engineer on the 5061A, and acting “project manager” of our
little two man development team. We were funded by manufacturing, as
Rick
noted, but sat in the R&D lab for about 18 months as we redesigned
(updated) a bunch of stuff on the 5061A.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Roberto was a very good engineer
(compared
to me at least), and a great mentor. One story he told me about himself
that I recall: He was originally from Nicaragua, and somehow wound up in
the US Army during Vietnam, spending some time in combat there as a GI.
At one point the Army wanted to send him to officers candidate school,
since he scored so well on all the tests. He was a smart guy, with
perfect English. Well into the process, they finally realized that he
wasn’t a US citizen, and thus couldn’t be an officer. He seemed to
make
it through the whole Vietnam experience with minimal PTSD (as far as I
could tell), and would tell an interesting (and likely cynical) war story
now an then. Like Rick said, Roberto kept his head down, and we sat in
a
shared work area and did our 5061B thing, surrounded by the team working
on
the new 5350,51,52 microwave counters, led by their very energetic
project
manager Bob Renner. The real R&D guys treated us well, even though we
were 2nd class production guys. (Not too many years before this, R&D
engineers and production engineers were not on the same pay scale, and
really were second class in HP eyes. The feeling of not being a “full”
engineer still lingered in 1984.)
As Rick said, PFS products like the cesium standards were cash cow
products, and didn’t have a R&D staff at all. All the “upgrades” were
funded by manufacturing, to keep this product line viable. The whole
development effort was about extending the production life of the 5061A.
We were selling about 15/month, with an average price of about $35K.
The
gross margins were very high (sales price – material costs), and the
product line delivered 4 or 5 million in gross profits to the division a
year. It was well worth having a couple of manufacturing engineers
freshen things up to keep this cow healthy. And Roberto was still the
production engineer for the 5061A during this time, so kinda doing double
duty.
My job on the 5061B was to redesign the clock display and the battery
charger. These were both part of the popular time-keeping option 003,
which was primarily the 1pps output circuit. The battery backup was to
prevent the 1PPS signal from losing syc. If there was a power
interruption. I recall the battery charger had a huge mica capacitor
that
couldn’t be purchased any more, and a crazy design with obscure TTL
counters. The clock display was even crazier. Not nixie tubes, but
two
or three circular PC boards driving LED displays, and again obscure ICs
that were hard to procure. Hard to build, and really expensive. (More
on these in another story on another day.)
Roberto redesigned the frequency divider module (5MHz in; 10MHz, 1MHz,
100kHz out – another odd design rooted in 5060 history), the A3 power
regulator board, and some stuff internal to one (both?) of the high
voltage
power supplies, used for the Ion Pump and Electron Multiplier. Maybe
some
other things too. For all of these, obsolete components was the driving
force.
By 1984 standards, there were some really crazy circuits still in the
instrument (still another story for another day), but as Rick said, in
low
volume manufacturing, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. In the case of
the
5061, don’t even think about touching it.
Rick’s memory of the management dynamics are similar to mine. A 5061A
to
5061B “upgrade”, particularly if funded by manufacturing, was easy to get
approved. Entire new developments were hard to justify. The
division
was under a lot of financial stress in the 1980s. Peace was breaking out
as the cold war was winding down, and DOD spending, which drove a lot of
instrumentation sales, was shrinking. Digital oscilloscopes and
synthesized frequency generators were obsoleting the need for frequency
counters, the majority of the divisions revenue. PFS was profitable,
but
zero growth. We also build laser interferometers, which did amazing
high
precision displacement measurements, but they weren’t growing either.
While profitable, the division revenue was shrinking maybe 10% per year.
In the 8 years I was there, headcount went from about 1500 to 500
people. Management was desperate to fund new products that would lead
to
growth. I recall the general manager at the time (Jim Horner), having a
metric for every new development on how much growth it would contribute
to
the division. It was never enough. Redesigning the 5061A yielded zero
growth (the demand for cesium standards was pretty flat) and thus not a
priority. A very light touch by manufacturing to keep it viable was
appropriate.
This email chain has unleashed a flood of memories from 30 years ago.
Hopefully a few of you find this walk down memory lane interesting.
I
have a few more stories in the que if any of you are still interested.
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com On Behalf Of Richard
(Rick) Karlquist
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 7:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <
time-nuts@lists.febo.com>; Magnus Danielson magnus@rubidium.dyndns.org
Cc: magnus@rubidium.se
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Long life products, obsolete components, and
code
4 parts. RE: HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale,
the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
The HP way (AFAIK) was as follows:
They were making the 5061A and the
default philosophy was don't fix it
if it ain't broke. However, products
reach a tipping point. In the case
of the 5061A, the obsolescence of the
Nixie tube was the straw that broke
the camel's back. But there were a
bunch of other issues that had also
accumulated a critical mass.
I was hired into HP in 1979 to work in the
Precision Frequency Sources R&D section
to work on the 10816 rubidium. That
project was eventually cancelled by a "new sheriff
in town" event upstairs, and took the
section with it. So they had to somehow
boot leg the 61B without an R&D section.
A production engineer
named Robert (I forgot his last name) was
the project manager. He basically tried
to keep his head down and not attract a
lot of attention. I am thinking that all
the money came out of the production engineering
budget.
Another HP way thing is that we would
go from A to B in order to get the clock
running on the end of support life. Upper
management would be not be suspicious of an
A to B, as opposed to a new product number,
which would be a red flag. The cesium line was
to be run as a cash cow, period. Len pulled a
rabbit out of the hat when he got permission for
the 5071A.
So the 61B was a bridge product to keep the
plane flying until the 71A came out. It
basically contained no gratuitous improvements,
only stuff that had to be fixed.
Rick
On 12/30/2018 5:23 AM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
Dear Hugh,
Many thanks for another nice post from the good old times.
Was a nice morning reading.
I didn't know that the 5061B was rebuilt with removing odd parts in
mind, but it makes sense. Interesting system with Code 1 to Code 4.
Cheers,
Magnus
On 12/29/18 5:36 AM, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) wrote:
My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in
manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering. A major task was dealing
with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products
had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of
semiconductors and integrated circuits.
In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” –
Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had
the
frequency counter product line. I managed the production engineering team
for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D
engineering new hire interview to qualify for. This technology was
invented
in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were
shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about
1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to
mind.
We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper
counters
for sale. But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into
some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was
more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our
customers.
The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old
units. I
recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about
obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond: “Tell me
how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.” The
manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say: “Our margins
are
well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our
salaries. Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.” Turns
out
that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we
kept building and selling them.
The PFS products were similar in this regard. The product line had
largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but
prices
and margins were high. Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production,
but the development was done, and it was good money. HP was a business
after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs. The was a
great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be
a
cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was
profitable, and preferably growing. Nothing was guaranteed.
HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we
were designing our products for long production lives and low materials
management overhead costs. Code 1 was best. Industry standard parts
available from many sources cheaply. Code 2 were OK to use. Code 3 was
something really special, and needed a good reason to include. Code 4
brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant
management review.
The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted
component was a life time buy. The Materials group hated this, because
they
had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys. What if they get
lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted
longer than we expected? A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per
year,
was a typical challenge. 10 more years of life? Buy 2400 parts? Perhaps
double it to 5000 parts. The response from component buyers was easy to
predict: “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor. We’re not
tying up $10K in one part. We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t
afford all this inventory.” So we would try harder. Maybe a 2N222A, or a
2N3904 will work. Procurements loves these parts. We’d try them out, and
hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification. New parts never had
the
same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and
design intent documentation non-existent. I bet half the time the old
transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969,
worked
fine, and he just used it. The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to
discourage this kind of design thinking.
When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85,
the
primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code 4 parts.
Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in
component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing
with
vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on. Our attitude was
trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was
already over 20 years old. We had a history of selling PFS instruments
for
decades, and we were preparing for decades more.
Bob kb8tq wrote: “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand
of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago
that
it still would be in production today.”
Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could),
and I didn’t work on the 5071. But for PFS products, in production
engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for
decades, with no end in sight. Volumes were low, so they didn’t get
redesigned very often. I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt
it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the
Rick – any memories you can share?
Happy New Year,
Hugh Rice
From: time-nuts <time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com<mailto:
time-nuts-bounces@lists.febo.com>> On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International
Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover
Hi
Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the
engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….
Bob
On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:
jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux@earthlink.net%
3cmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net>>> wrote:
On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it
goes away, how
many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack
that
nobody on the
planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in
production today.
EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building
one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole
aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and
it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you
give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or
test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but
pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus
enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case
there's
some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem
happens
early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of
desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way
from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's
EOL,
and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you
buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part
X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their
widget
using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C
does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using
spare
parts bought by original Mission A.
I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in
- in things like breadboards at work.
On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.net
<mailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net<mailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net%
3cmailto:hmurray@megapathdsl.net>>> wrote:
jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux@earthlink.net<mailto:
jimlux@earthlink.net%3cmailto:jimlux@earthlink.net>> said:
and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There
are
lots of
parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only",
and when
they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a
part. The
usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date
lifetime
buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has
purchased
them, or
maybe only purchased significant quantities.
If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what
you expect
to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover
something like
the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a
few years
warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign
that section.
time-nuts@lists.febo.com<mailto:time-nuts@lists.febo.com%
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