Before I launch into this story, I'd like to mention that one of the readers of this blog is my old friend, Ed. Wait, I should rephrase that. I meant that Ed is a person who has been my friend for a long time, more than 30 years. Our careers aligned coincidentally, and we often worked at the same companies doing essentially the same jobs. Ed is now at Lam Research, where he's worked for 25 years (I got out after 17), but he has a family to support. Anyway, Ed, feel free to jump in and offer corrections and/or additions.
In the mid-'70s, I (and Ed) worked at Timex. No, I never met John Cameron Swayze. The facility was in Cupertino, CA, right across the street from Apple, and was dedicated to research and the development of liquid crystal displays. To say that the atmosphere there was relaxed would be an understatement. Our manager was an engineer promoted (I question that word in this context) far beyond his abilities who was more interested in rearranging his office and flirting with a cute tech than actually doing any R&D. We, the workers, had a lot of latitude, especially in the morning before the engineers and managers arrived.
In a previous blog I described using an evaporator for coating. My favorite deposition equipment at Timex was a sputter machine. It looked like a very large tuna fish can with a porthole. Items to be coated are placed on a rotating metal plate, similar to the doodad that goes around on the bottom of a microwave oven. On the underside of the top of the can is fastened a target, which is the deposition source. The target can be a number of materials, from silver to quartz.
To sputter, the sputterer is pumped to vacuum, and then a gas or a mixture of gases is introduced and voltage is applied to the platen and target. That causes the gases to ionize and bombard the target with molecules, which then knock atoms from the target that are drawn to the platen and coat the substrate. That's the end of the complicated part.
I thought the sputterer was really cool, and I often played with it in the mornings. Different gases result in different colors when they're ionized. A nitrogen plasma is particularly nice, IMO, a deep crimson. So I tried different gases to see what colors they'd be. I even did a hydrogen-oxygen mixture once, which might not have been the brightest idea. I think the plasma was pale blue, but I don't really remember.
The '70s are notable mostly for following the '60s, and life was still more relaxed than it is today. So I wasn't really surprised when one of my friends (not Ed) asked me for a favor. To do it, I installed a 99.9999% pure gold target in the sputterer. Around the outer edge of the platen I placed a pack of safety razor blades. I lit it up a couple of times and… TAH DAH!… gold-plated razor blades. But I was a bit horrified to see that the images of the razor blades remained on the now gold-coated platen. It was too late to do anything about it but hope for the best.
The deposition engineer was a guy named Dave. He was a really good guy and a good engineer, but completely oblivious to the underlying dramas of the lab. On the razor blade morning, Dave came in and opened the sputterer, looked at the platen, looked at me, and said, "Please install the quartz target. I'll be back after I have my coffee."
And that was that.
4 comments:
Do gold plated razor blades work better or last longer?
If I recall correctly, he said something about a smoother shave.
I'm over in Hawaii this week and just checked the blog. I remember seeing those shadowed platens and going "Hmmmm". I was still working there when they shut the place down and I split the bottle of gold evaporator pellets with a couple of engineers you would remember as a bonus. I still have them.
Also when they shut down they were building the Timex-Sinclair computers. They paid me for 2 weeks to go to the railroad yard in San Jose where they had 3 boxcars of computers ready for shipment. My job was to smash every last one of them with a sledgehammer so they could write them off. Somehow a few cases of them went home with me.
Ed
Cool story! Do you still have have any of the Timex-Sinclair computers? Of course, what would you do with them if you did? The emulator at
http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/ts1000/
probably runs faster than the original computer. It probably won't be too long before you won't be able to find an old TV to plug it into!
I gave one of the Sinclair ZX-81 kits to my youngest brother-in-law for Christmas in '81. Of course, it didn't work when he put it together and one of the techs I worked with had to help him debug it. But, that was cool, too, especially when they got it to work! I don't think it lasted very long, but he and his brother were excited to play with it while it did. He now programs industrial computers in the Andover, MA water treatment plant where he works.
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