A Trip Down Memory Lane

While cleaning up my home office a few months ago, I came across an old sales catalog from Beta Products.  Per a notice on the back page, it was copyrighted in 1985.  This was actually a year or so before the Betalert 10B came out, so there is no mention of the Betalert 10B in it (obviously).  There was a page for the Betalert 10 (the predecessor of the Betalert 10B).  See the next blog entry for that.

Finding this catalog was definitely a trip down memory lane for me since it has some pictures in it of the factory at the time, so I thought I’d share some snippets of it with you.

NOTE:  I am not the copyright holder of the sales catalog or any of the images presented below.  They were originally published by Beta Products in the 1985 timeframe.  When Beta Products was bought by Hathaway Process Instrumentation a year or two later, the copyright transferred to them.  I'm not sure who bought Hathaway, but I'm reasonably certain that the copyrights have expired.

THE BUILDING

Above is a picture of the Beta Products building in Carrollton, Texas as it was in 1985.  I loved that building.  It was humongous (at least to me).  It was a relatively new building then and was clean and neat and well lit.  It was heaven to me. 

The front quarter of the building was split into two floors and was the office area.  This consisted of engineering, drafting, document control, sales, marketing, accounting, personnel (it wasn’t called HR back then), production control, etc.  The back three quarters of the building was “open” (i.e. a single floor that was two stories tall) which contained inventory, printed circuit board assembly, product assembly, product testing, quality assurance, systems staging, packing, and shipping.

We only remained in that building for about 2 years after I joined the company.  Around that time we were bought by Hathaway Process Instrumentation and it was decided we would move a mile or so away to a cheaper facility.  The former owner of Beta Products also owned the building above and, after the sale, water-cooler rumor had it that he was asking an outrageous monthly lease figure.  So we moved.

The building in the picture above is still there, but it was bought by a church not long after we moved out and is still a church today.  I’ll try to drive over there and get a picture of it someday and post it.

The Reception Area

This was our lobby area.  The receptionist was named Chris and was the sweetest and classiest lady you could ever hope to meet.  As the first impression people had of Beta Products, she definitely put a great face and a wonderful voice to the company.  They don’t make ‘em like her anymore!

That chair there to the right is where I sat when I walked in off the street (literally) to apply for a job after college.  I didn’t have a car (or much of anything, really).  I just “cold called” in there for a job one day.  Chris told me years later that she and a few of the other ladies that worked there had watched me walk out the door after my interview and begin walking down Beltline Road (a relatively desolate highway back then).  I walked the two miles (approximately) to nearby Coppell where I was staying with an old college buddy of mine until I could find a job.

I can’t remember if that palm tree next to the chair was real or fake.

Sales and Marketing

This was our sales and marketing area.  It was located directly above the lobby in the previous picture.  Being a lowly engineer, I didn’t get to go up there very often.  The one person in the picture whose name I remember is the woman sitting at the word processor.  (I only remember her because I had a crush on her for the longest time, though she was probably ten years older than I was).  She was extremely sweet and personable.  I thought she was the bee’s knees.  Unfortunately for me, she was happily married.

In the foreground, get a load of that gigantic IBM Selectric typewriter!  It was a beast.  I think it was one of the ones with the extra wide carriages in it for funky-sized legal documents and whatnot.

Notice, too, the PC-looking thing that she is staring into.  That wasn’t a PC.  It was a dedicated word processor.  It ran “Symphony”.  I had to use it once for something and it was very clunky and unintuitive.  She would usually step in and rescue us poor engineering lunks and offer to do the typing for us.  She knew the system inside and out and could type like blue blazes.

Other equipment from the period:  the Rolodex, the Telex, green-bar paper.

Assembly Line

Here is a shot out on the assembly line.  Most of what went on here was wiring up the chassis for various products.  The annunciators we built back then contained a LOT of wiring.  The lamps that illuminated the annunciator windows fit into sockets, which were connected with discrete wires to card-edge connectors into which the logic cards were plugged.  The logic cards contained the circuits that performed the various ISA flash sequences.  Also hand-wired were the auxiliary relays, power, pushbuttons, etc.  So, for a typical 48-window annunciator with two light bulbs in each window, this amounted to a LOT of wiring.  Those racks and shelves against the wall to the right in the picture were basically nothing but spools of wire of different gauges and colors and insulation materials.  You can also see the “crimping” machines, that automatically stripped an eighth inch or so of insulation off of the wire and then crimped connector pins onto them.

Away far in the back of the picture, though it’s hard to see, was the mechanical assembly area.  This was manned by a lone, elderly man (I forgot his name, sadly) who put together all of the chassis for all of our products.  Sheet metal parts (sides, tops, fronts, backs, brackets, etc.) would come out of our sheet metal shop and he would screw, bolt, and rivet them all together to make the annuciator “box”.  It would then make its way up to the tables where it was wired.

I have forgotten nearly all of these ladies’ names.  The main one I remember is on the front table at the far right of the picture.  She and I actually became very close friends, though I lost contact with her about 15 years ago.  She worked her way up from the line, to running the stock room, to eventually becoming the purchaser.  We were quite the daring duo by the time she was purchaser.  By then I was the engineering manager (much more impressive-sounding than it actually was) and when vendors would invite her to free lunches or give her free tickets to go see the Texas Rangers or something, she'd invite me along with them.  Those were the boom-town days in electrical gadgetry.  Parts vendors were constantly providing all sorts of nice freebies (dinners, lunches, game tickets, etc.)  Good times.

(By the way, the two white circles in the photo above are from the holes in the sales catalog for three-ring binders.)

Wave solder machine

This was our wave solder machine.  All of our printed wiring boards were for through-hole parts back then, since surface mount technology was still in its infancy and generally only used in high volume products.   We had a half-dozen or so ladies who stuffed parts into PWBs all day long.  When they had a big enough batch of them, they would be taken over to the wave solder machine and ran over a sort of “waterfall” of molten solder.  This would solder all the parts to the board.  They then went to QA and then on to test.  The lady above, at the time I worked there, was the person that had been with the company the longest; something like 30 years or so.  She retired at some point while I was there, towards the end of my tenure.  She was really nice.

Metal Shop

This was our metal shop.  Most everything we built was made out of sheet aluminum.  For most products, exposed but generally unseen aluminum surfaces (e.g. the backs of units) were brushed aluminum.  The front panels were unfinished (i.e. smooth) aluminum or steel and were painted black.  We had all kinds of equipment:  NC punches, bending equipment, shearing equipment, etc.  It was pretty cool to watch.  I can’t remember the gentleman’s name shown in the picture above, but he was a very good machinist (or whatever they were called).

Packing and Shipping

When a product or system had passed test and went through QA for sell-off, it went to the packaging and shipping department.  This was a one-man operation for the most part.  I can’t remember the gentleman’s name above, but he was a very nice, very decent man.  His daughter worked in various positions in the company over time (engraving, document control).  The main thing I remember about the man above is that he absolutely loved Old Spice aftershave and so you could always tell where he had been throughout the building.  But for him, it worked.  It wasn't obnoxious.

There was some cool equipment in the packing department.  There was this machine that was loaded with a large spool of paper packing tape (you can kind of see it in the picture between the man’s desk and the loop of hoses).  The tape was made out of brown paper and was about four inches wide.  It had some sort of threads (nylon maybe?) that ran the length of the spool and were embedded into a sort of non-sticky adhesive, about four or five threads spaced equally across the width of the tape.  On the machine you could punch a length (say, 36 inches) and it would feed that length of the tape across a reservoir of water, activating the adhesive on the backside.  That tape came out plenty fast, so you could get a really nasty paper cut on it if you weren't careful.  It would then cut it off to the desired length.  You then took the tape and used it to seal the boxes.You can see some in the picture above, forming a cross on the tops of the boxes in the foreground.

Another cool device was the spray foam machine.  You can see the hoses for it off to the right in the photo.  Once you got the product wrapped in plastic and set into the shipping box, you would spray liquid foam into the box and it would expand to fill the box.  It was really cool to watch!  This was the precursor to the foam insulation we use in houses nowadays.  I remember the foam in liquid form was super hot.  If you got any on your skin it would burn the bejeebers out of you.  And if you got any of the liquid foam on your clothes, you pretty much had to throw them away, because it would become an integral part of the weave of the cloth.  (Don’t ask me how I know these things … lol!)

Also, as you can tell from the photo, it was about ten minutes to ten o’clock.  Or possible ten to 4:00.  It’s hard to tell in that grainy picture.

======================================================================

Anyway, that was my trip down memory lane.  Those were wonderful years at Beta Products and I really miss them and I miss all of the people.  For that very brief moment in time, we were a family.