I worked at Fairchild Sentry DTS in San Jose (at that time very close to the airport) circa 1984-1986 on the series 50 ATE. It was a beast. At the time it could

I worked at Fairchild Sentry DTS in San Jose (at that time very close to the airport) circa 1984-1986 on the series 50 ATE. It was a beast. At the time it could clock & test up to 50MHz (hence the '50'). It was pretty much all ECL which would get very hot. Each unit shipped with a DEC VAX - that was my intro to VMS which had some interesting features like file versioning. I worked as a tech on the production floor building the 50. It was just being introduced and there were so many problems with getting them up and running. The systems had to be calibrated and that was done by changing the lengths of hundreds of delay wires on the backplane (in addition to digital delay-lines in the test head that could be automatically calibrated (over several hours) with the delay values being stored on disk). No two systems were exactly the same because of this (I'm sure this was also an issue with earlier ATE models as well). IIRC the 50 was "introduced" (announced) in '84 shortly before the time I started. I recall that we were way behind in producing them and there was lots of blame flying between production (us) and engineering - as in maybe they designed something that wasn't easily reproducible. In my next job I moved into an engineering role and I always kept that experience as a technician in the back of my mind: make sure what you're designing can be built with reproducible results.