Aaaah, the Calma

Keeping a semiconductor fabrication line full was a problem then, as it is now. Mitel took all sorts of contracts including, at one point, the manufacture and test of a car racing game for Magnavox. The two chip set was mounted (die-bonded) on a hybrid substrate but the design was so quirky (and process control so variable) that batch-to-batch the yield would vary from 0 to about 60%, if I recall. The solution was to bond up three or four and then test them,.. testing involved getting people (usually young women from the operations staff) to play the game several times and note down any anomalies. I remember seeing hybrids with notes scribbled on them like 'No sound', 'Left car doesn't work'...

The best tester was Monique Poulin, she was considered to have such a light touch with electronic devices that they made her the Calma operator. The Calma was a station for doing layout but at the time there were no colour screens so all layout was done in various shades of green differentiated by different dashed lines or cross-hatching. I did some manual modifications to the 8804 on it, a chip with fewer than 1 000 transistors it it took days of painstaking effort, not the least of which was the checking. The Calma computer was serial number 18 and it had been created using wire-wrapped components, It took up several large cabinets (each a bit smaller than a refridgerator), it used a digitizing pen and x-y tablet and came with a huge 6 foot by 6 foot by 4 foot high Xynetics 1100 plotter. When Mitel wanted to get rid of it I bought it at auction and kept it in my basement for years, I still regret that I sold it off for metal scrap when I moved to Calgary but I still have a few of the peripherals and a complete set of printed manuals.