Oral-History:Bruce Angwin

About Bruce Angwin

Bruce Angwin is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and has worked at GE and other locations like Oakridge, Fermilab, Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Angwin also served as IEEE Region 6 Director from 1964-1966 and has been involved in Wescon since its origins in the 1940s.

In this interview, Angwin mostly details the beginnings of Wescon – as a bringing together of the IRE and WEMA in 1943 – bringing forward the idea of combining trade organizations and technical societies, and the issue of West Coast electronics itself. Angwin talks about the process of growing Wescon, and the many decisions and struggles it involved, such as the question of corporate ‘protection,’ and the conflict between the West and East coasts. The formation of various groups such as ERA and EEEI (later ECI) showed Wescon’s determination to stay an independent entity from IEEE, while still sponsored by the Institute. These groups later managed other shows such as Electro, Midcon, Southcon and Northcon. Angwin also discusses famous names that he associated with at one time or another – such as General MacArthur, Omar Bradley, Ronald Reagan, Mary Tyler Moore and Fred Terman – as well as the archive he has about the convention. A collection which spans the history of all the conventions managed by the ERA and ECI, Angwin has programs, publications, correspondence, documentation and a large amount of photographs. In the interview, Angwin talks about much of his collection, including sharing some photographs and printed documents with the interviewer.

Note: This interview contains two pauses - one which is commented upon in the interview, and the other is marked [Tape Paused] and begins again mid-sentence. The interview ends abruptly while discussing part of Angwin's archive.

About the Interview

BRUCE ANGWIN: An Interview Conducted by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, 11 February 2003

Interview #427 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Inc.

Copyright Statement

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.

Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, 39 Union Street,New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8538 USA. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Bruce Angwin, an oral history conducted in 2003 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.  

Interview

Interview: Bruce Angwin

Interviewer: John Vardalas

Date: 11 February 2003

Location: West Los Angeles, California

Wescon Beginnings: WEMA and IRE

Vardalas:

What was the impetus to create Wescon, and what do you think its impact has been over the years and what it has done?

Angwin:

I could talk for hours on it, so let me see if I can keep it real short. World War II, there was a fledgling electronics industry that started to grow in the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Angeles area that was directly impacted by World War II in that in order to be able to manufacture, to hold personnel to get materials, you had to be involved in the war effort. It seemed that the Pentagon felt the West Coast ran north and south through Chicago and there wasn’t much beyond that. So the people in the electronics industry here realized that they had to do something to draw attention to the West Coast as a manufacturing research and development area relative to electronics. They formed a trade association known as West Coast Electronic Manufacturers Association. The acronym of that is WEMA. They successfully lobbied to get contracts here on the West Coast.

That organization has chapters in San Francisco and Los Angeles and would hold regular meetings relative to their industrial problems, successes, aspirations, and in particular how they could stay alive during this war period. At the same time, the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers), the predecessor to IEEE, had sections in those same areas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The people who headed the industry in those areas that were members of WEMA were such people as Dave Packard, Bill Hewlett, along with others of that character. The electronics industry at that time was headed mostly by engineering rather than as it is today. The upper echelon in almost all electronics companies were engineers. As a result, these individuals who would attend the WEMA meetings also would attend the IRE meetings.

Well, it happened that one year the annual meeting for both of these organizations happened to fall on the same day. This posed a problem to many engineers in this area, “Which of the two that I am involved with shall I participate in this activity?” I happened to be here and helped with the solution to that problem. That solution was to merge the two together into a single event. Our annual meeting to a large extent was social, so it was decided to hold them together. A feature of the trade association’s meetings was to lay on the table samples of their products. It may be a record player, it may be an amplifier, or something of that sort, to more or less say, “We’ve been meeting here in closed meetings for eleven months this year. Here is really what I am producing, and I am interested in what you are producing.” At the same time, the IRE held their annual technical conference, and they had rather impressive speakers at that conference. The observation of those that attended, because now they could encompass both the Trade Association and the technical society in a single meeting, was it was fabulous—they had never done that before. The interest on the part of the manufacturers of talking directly with the engineers who were designing devices which may use either the products or the services of the companies was an unusual experience. It was a very successful meeting.

Vardalas:

What year was that when the two coincided?

Angwin:

That was in 1943, I believe.

Vardalas:

Oh, okay. So it was right in the middle of the war.

Angwin:

Yes. It was so successful here in Los Angeles that the next year the San Francisco section of the IRE and the San Francisco chapter of WEMA decided they would do the same thing. They did it that year, in 1945, in San Francisco. Again, it was a big success. They realized that this was really something that we should nurture. One person that was then interested in seeing that it produced something in the future was Bill Hewlett, who happened to be the President of the IRE at that time. It also included the [[[Frederick Terman|Fred Terman]]] Dean of Engineering at Stanford University who wrote the textbooks that most engineering students at that period used throughout the country. They decided that an activity of this sort could be very successful, but there was some question as to whether it could stand an annual activity. It might be a little too soon; maybe every other year. So the idea of holding it in San Francisco one year and the next year in Los Angeles and then the following year in San Francisco solved that problem. Then the engineer or whoever was planning to attend would say, “When is this show going to be held next?” rather than, “Oh my gosh! Is it time for that again?” That was generally what they thought if it was every year, but if it was every other year it had developed a need and interest in being produced again.

Vardalas:

So there wasn’t a local demand? The San Francisco people didn’t always to go Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles ones didn’t always come here?

Angwin:

They did.

Vardalas:

So in a sense, it was every year for them.

Angwin:

But the first four or five years, no. They were local. For example, I worked for General Electric at that time, and my territory was the entire West Coast, so I would attend both of these. We’ve talked about the Hewlett-Packard Company; Hewlett-Packard had interest in Southern California as well. So engineers and management from Hewlett-Packard would attend down here. There was cross-fertilization, even then.

The IRE portion of this was under the impetus of the region of IRE at that time, which is exactly the same geographic area that the sixth region of IEEE is today. So this was a regional event as far as they were concerned, because the technical conference that had spawned this was a regional conference. As far as the trade association, WEMA, was concerned, they only had two chapters, but they were centered in the two major production areas of the West Coast, which were San Francisco and Los Angeles. So again, the idea was that hopefully this activity, when it really proved itself, would rotate within the west to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, in successive years. By the time that that plan was beginning to germinate, this activity had grown so large that it could only be accommodated in San Francisco and Los Angeles. So the idea of spreading out through the west to the benefit of one of the two sponsors really didn’t happen. It stayed where it started in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas.

Before very long, it became a major show and convention. Its counterpart was held by the IRE in New York. It was the IRE Show and Convention in New York. That was held in the spring of every year. At that time, those of us that lived here in Los Angeles saw New York as a two-day journey, even if you flew. You usually flew in a plane that would go as far as Chicago or St. Louis; you’d stay overnight; you’d board another plane the next morning and go the rest of the way. It was a major thing. So there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for the West Coast engineers to participate in the IRE show and convention in New York. So we turned this into a counterpart of that show and held it in the fall of the year, actually during the time that most schools were finishing their summer vacation, so it began in August, usually.

Vardalas:

Ah, so that the professors could go.

Angwin:

Because travel was not as easy as it is today, that gave many engineers the opportunity to bring their whole families. So the activity had a lot of women’s activity involved in it. As well as a technical convention, a trade show, there also was for the wives field trips to interesting places in town, fashion shows, luncheons, and things of that sort. That was a part of the activity, too. And it really grew.

Numbers, Formal Structure and 'Protection'

Vardalas:

In the beginning, in the early years, the first five, six, seven, eight years, what were the numbers who came to these things about?

Angwin:

As this activity grew, it became apparent that it really needed several things it didn’t have. One came about because one of the social events here in the Los Angeles area was to be a banquet in a nightclub in Hollywood, Earl Carrol’s Nightclub, which was one of the big nightclubs in the area. We plunked the whole bankroll of $600 down on a down payment on that banquet, only to read in the paper the next morning that Earl White’s went bankrupt. That posed a real problem for us—there went our money. But in addition to that, there was a feeling of liability, and who was really liable, and what are we going to do to make this up?

Well, as it turned out, the tradeshow portion of this subsidized that show. But we realized that it was necessary to have some formality here; that it was necessary to protect those who we called directors, who were the ones that were doing the scut work in putting this together each year, because they could be sued. It now was in the order of maybe 20,000 attendees, and 1,000 exhibit booths, and 40 technical sessions; it was that size by that time. So the question came: do we form a legal identity that has both the necessary elements that we need to do this, and also the protection for those that are doing it? We faced the question of should we then fly under the corporate umbrella of the IRE? (By that time, incidentally, the IRE had become the IEEE). So, should we fall under the corporate umbrella of the IEEE?

Vardalas:

What year would this be that this discussion was taking place about a more formal structure? In the early ’50s?

Angwin:

This will tell you.

Vardalas:

Okay, good. All right.

Angwin:

There was one of the opportunities. But the IEEE members here said, “We’ve got a good thing going here now. We don’t want to put ourselves under the umbrella of Big Brother on the East Coast.” And there was this East versus West competition at that time because, by that time, this was a show and convention in competition with the official IEEE activity in New York every year.

Vardalas:

How would this put them under their thumb? Because it would require involvement?

Angwin:

In order to enjoy the corporate protection of the IEEE, we would have to become a part of the IEEE. We considered ourselves somewhat independent. We considered ourselves a mutual activity of a part of the IEEE and a part of a trade organization, and that we were neither wholly one or the other.

One opportunity, then, was to fall under the corporate protection of IEEE; the next was to fall under the corporate protection of WEMA; the third was to apply for corporate identity ourselves. Of the three, we chose to consider the activity a committee of WEMA, of the trade association, because WEMA involves San Francisco and Los Angeles only; IEEE was New York. We felt much more comfortable with our own geographic area involved, rather than under the supposed subservience of New York. We weren’t sure.

At that time, we had called this activity the Pacific Electronic Show and IRE West Coast Convention. That was much too much of a name, and we decided to call it the Western Electronic Show and Convention. But, we would always call it the Western Electronic Show and Convention; we would not develop an acronym. We wanted a name that defined us clearly. So we identified this activity as the Western Electronic Show and Convention, and the first thing we knew, the media called it “Wescon,” the acronym.

Vardalas:

Oh, so they coined it?

Angwin:

So it was the media that turned our full name into the acronym that was Wescon. Most people today don’t even know what Wescon stands for, what the acronym really stands for.

WEMA Pulls Out, Region 6 and Sections

Vardalas:

I see. But now those legal issues were borne by WEMA now, you’re saying?

Angwin:

That’s right. Then after about fifteen years, WEMA decided that they no longer really wanted to put their full efforts into a trade show. They were much more comfortable with a lobbying type effort. In fact, an effort not unlike IEEE-USA. They announced that they wanted to withdraw from this partnership that was putting on Wescon. They pulled out. By that time, we had a pretty substantial bankroll, and we bought them out, as it were, or they took their equity that they had, whichever way you want to look at it. For a year and a half it was an IEEE-sponsored activity, initially under the sixth region of the IEEE. Incidentally, I emphasize that the original IRE region was the same as the IEEE region. That’s true because of Wescon.

Vardalas:

Really? Why is that?

Angwin:

Because by that time, we had involved the entire region in the development of Wescon, in providing papers, and providing support, and also in the benefits from it. The benefits initially were a service; later, cash. We operated it as a non-profit activity and fed the benefits back in after a certain protection fee had been held.

Vardalas:

But there was no legal connection between you and IEEE at this point?

Angwin:

Not really, except that the whole thing was being run by the region, initially. Then when it got centered into the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, the region asked the San Francisco and Los Angeles sections, later counsels, to take the responsibility on their behalf of running this. The region then became a beneficiary, but really did not become involved in the development and production of the activity.

At the time, then, that WEMA pulled out, the region said, “Hey, look, this really isn’t a regional activity; it’s a San Francisco and Los Angeles [activity]. Why don’t you two take over our equity in Wescon and in exchange for that, give us twenty percent of any surpluses that are developed from this activity into the future?” We thought that was a pretty good deal, because we were doing that work anyway. If we could develop a good surplus that could support our activities locally, eighty percent of it went to San Francisco and Los Angeles, twenty percent went to the region as a whole, and that was a good trade. So at that time, the sponsorship, that you might call the ownership, then rested in the San Francisco and Los Angeles sections of the IEEE.

We recognized, however, during this year and a half, that one of the real benefits of Wescon was that it brought together the industry and the profession. It brought together the manufacturers and the engineers. Now with WEMA stepping out, it was purely engineering, and we were already beginning to see some differences here. In particular because the finances that could support the whole thing came from the tradeshow, and the tradeshow really is more recognized as a part of what had been the WEMA section of this, and the technical conferences was the IEEE. The technical conferences cost more than they developed. The tradeshow developed enough cash that it could run the whole thing and still divide a surplus among the sponsors, and that surplus was divided fifty-fifty. So here was a mutual activity of a trade organization and a technical society without consideration of who was the channel through which the funds came and who was the channel through which the technical interest came. But rather, it was a total event that they both participated in and had equal interest in, and therefore worked equally hard and had equal benefits.

ERA as Sponsor

Well, when WEMA pulled out, we started to look for another sponsor like a trade association. The best one we could find was the ERA (Electronic Representatives Association), and I happen to be a member of that as well.

Vardalas:

Who are they? What were they?

Angwin:

That is an organization that was founded in Chicago to provide support and services to manufacturers’ representatives in the field who would represent a variety of companies in their sales in the field. A manufacturer, like General Electric, the company I used to work for, had their own field sales forces and application engineering forces in the field. But a very small company couldn’t afford to support personnel and an office in a variety of cities, and they therefore, would contract with a local manufacturer’s representative to represent them as he also represents other manufacturers in perhaps compatible products or services, to the benefit of all of them.

Well, this was an ideal trade association, because it was much like WEMA before it was made up of production companies, manufacturing companies. The ERA was made up of representatives of those manufacturing companies as a whole. So we then sold back thirty percent of Wescon to the two chapters of ERA: a San Francisco chapter and a Los Angeles chapter of ERA. So now instead of Wescon being owned by the San Francisco and Los Angeles Sections of the IEEE and the San Francisco and Los Angeles Counsels of WEMA, it was the San Francisco and Los Angeles Sections of IEEE and the San Francisco and Los Angeles Counsels of ERA. A very similar situation. Again we flourished.

Vardalas:

ERA jumped at the idea? There was no hesitation on their part that needed convincing on this?

Angwin:

The only hesitation they had was: where do they find the money to buy their way in? They did it by borrowing money from their own members and paying back their members from the proceeds that came from this mutual activity. They sold five-year futures to certain of their members, and they were able to pay them back in two years. But they were in for thirty percent rather than fifty percent. That posed an interesting problem: where is the responsibility? Is it seventy-thirty or is it fifty-fifty? In order to really be successful, we had operated on a fifty-fifty basis, and we didn’t care who owned what. Those things that had to do with the trade show were generally handled by the trade association; those activities that had to do with the technical conference were handled by the IEEE; the social activities, field trips, women’s activities, banquets, that sort of thing, they were handled mutually by both. That was a nice division. So it was a fifty-fifty division. We operated then for many years as a seventy-thirty ownership but fifty-fifty activity organization.

Vardalas:

So decision-making was fifty-fifty voting?

Angwin:

Essentially.

EEEI and ECI

About that time, too, we lost our corporate umbrella when WEMA pulled out, because we were under the corporate umbrella of WEMA. When WEMA decided to withdraw, we had the same old problem again. This time we decided to form our own corporation. That corporation was known as Electrical and Electronic Exhibitions, Incorporated: the EEEI.

Vardalas:

The EEEI—was that intentional, as opposed to IEEE?

Angwin:

As a matter of fact, the president of IEEE at that time was Bud Eldon. Bud Eldon is quite a jokester, and he proposed that as a joke. It caught on, and we actually incorporated under that name.

Vardalas:

Because you look in the mirror: you see one, you see the other reversed.

Angwin:

That’s right.

Vardalas:

When was EEEI incorporated? Is that in here, too?

Angwin:

Yes, that’s in there, too.

About a year and a half later, at IEEE headquarters’ suggestion, we changed the name to Electronic Conventions, Incorporated (ECI). We re-incorporated under that change. The only change at that time was in name. There was no change in what we did, how we did it, all of the other things. It was purely a name change.

Managing Intercon

Just before ECI was formed, during that same period, the IEEE international convention, known as Intercon, in New York, got into real serious trouble because we were in a recession and they began to lose money. It was doubtful that they could survive another year. We had had a friendly competition between us for many years: Wescon versus Intercon. A lot of pride, and we took great delight in downsizing the other one in our own eyes. But the IEEE swallowed their pride and said, “Look, guys, you out there in Wescon have a very successful thing running. We’re having real trouble here, and we don’t think we can survive another year. Would you take a management contract to operate Intercon?” Then came another dilemma (we’ve had lots of dilemmas). This dilemma was we’ve got our hands full here on the West Coast, and we’ve got a good thing going here on the East Coast. Now, Big Brother is asking us, “Please give us a hand on the East Coast. We really don’t want to do this.” I mean, they’re still pretty far away. You could make it in one day’s flight now, but we’re very successful here doing things in our back yard. But we don’t really want— But how do we turn them down? Well, the way we would turn them down was to say, “Yes, we’ll do it. However, the activity that you have coveted as an IEEE-only activity, we want to change to an IEEE plus an ERA activity. We want you to take on a partner in your own national convention and tradeshow. We will manage it, provided we have total authority in the management. We don’t want anyone looking over our shoulders. You can fire us, but you can’t manipulate us. And we will charge a healthy management fee.” We wrote this down and sent it off, and said, “Okay, that’s the end of that. We’ll never hear from that again.” Two days later we were given a contract to sign, and we became the official managers of IEEE’s Intercon.

In the process, the IEEE formed a committee of top-notch people, and they took a serious look at this and they said, “You know, this is really the way it should run.” They said, “It should be like Wescon. It should in effect be a clone of Wescon.” So far it was a clone of Wescon. We were running it just like we were running Wescon.

Vardalas:

So you forced them to introduce the trade element into it.

Angwin:

Yes. Although they also were supported by a trade element, but they were supported in that they contracted with an association manager in the city to develop a tradeshow in association with their technical activity. But as far as IEEE was concerned, all of their effort went into the technical program. During the recession, the trade portion of that began to get into trouble, and that’s where their funding was coming from, and they didn’t quite know how to cope with that. We had been successful at coping with it, fortunately, but they didn’t know how.

Vardalas:

You were successful because you made them equal partners in it? Is that the idea of how you were successful, as opposed to them?

Angwin:

No, as a matter of fact, the partnership then became a seventy-thirty. But we were successful for a variety of reasons. That’s a whole story in itself. I’d be glad to go over it with you, but I don’t think this is the time for it.

The upshot of it was that after three years of our operating and managing and planning the Intercon show, they decided that they should do just like we were doing and officially affiliate with the ERA chapters in the East, specifically those in the Northeast and the New York area, perhaps as far south as Baltimore, Washington, something of that sort. So it became a Region 1, Region 2 activity. Incidentally, and strangely enough, at that time there was another tradeshow and convention that was centered out of Boston that also got into trouble and was on the verge of going bankrupt. As a matter of fact, they had to give up the show one year, and they aborted it before it opened. They were in more trouble than IEEE headquarters was. So here was a good equal partner for New York in taking the show out of New York every year and putting it somewhere else, namely Boston, every other year. Just like Wescon was San Francisco/Los Angeles, this show Intercon would become New York/Boston. The sponsors would be elements of the ERA, but a minor element of the ERA and the IEEE. They wrote into their plans some restrictions that even the ERA personnel that were involved in this had to be IEEE members—they made it even stronger. Then the question was should this be called Intercon, or should this be called Nerim, which was the name of the show in Boston that had floundered. A little local fight started as to whom was going to be absorbed into the other. The solution was dissolve both and form a new one called Electro. So the Electro show replaced the Intercon and Nerim shows. I became the General Manager of all the shows. That became pretty successful.

So our organization, ECI, now was owned and was producing Wescon and was producing Electro.

More Conventions and ECM

We in quick succession formed Midcon, which involved initially Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. Atlanta never came into that, though, because we found that a three-year rotation was not soon enough in any one of the three locations; it had to be a two-year rotation. So we spun Atlanta off with Orlando. So Southcon then ran between Atlanta and Orlando; Midcon between Chicago and Dallas; and Northcon was formed, which rotated between Seattle and Portland.

Vardalas:

Oh, so that took care of the Northwest? Oh, I see.

Angwin:

Yes. So now we had five shows we were running.

Vardalas:

These are all regional?

Angwin:

All regional, all with similar ownership, the ownership being in those regions. We only owned Wescon, but we managed the other shows under a management contract. The IRS said, “Hey, you’re getting so much in this management that you’re no longer a non-profit organization for your own area. Your non-profit status is going to go bye-bye,” which meant that the benefits that we were plowing back into our areas would disappear.

The solution to that was to form a subsidiary corporation called Electronic Conventions Management, as opposed to Electronic Conventions, Incorporated (ECI). Electronic Conventions Management, Incorporated (ECM), a for-profit corporation.

Vardalas:

So a non-profit organization can have a for-profit subsidiary?

Angwin:

That’s right. So we as a non-profit corporation had a for-profit subsidiary to which we assigned all of our staff and all of our major expenses so that they never made a profit, and off we went. The boards of directors of the two corporations were the same people and the same office. By that time we had a pretty good staff. When I retired from my normal work, I stopped being a volunteer in this activity and I became a staff member and ultimately became the President and General Manager of ECI. Essentially I worked for ECI for nineteen years. I had helped form the whole thing all the way through, and I’m perhaps the only one that’s had that long a train through. I’m still a member of the board. That, then, got us over that hump with the IRS.

Convention Problems

Things went pretty well until Chicago stopped being an electronics center in the country. Chicago was producing mostly television sets and hi-fi and things of that sort, which were no longer produced in this country. They were produced in Japan and later all over the world, but not in Chicago. So Midcon began to disappear, and pretty soon the Midcon show just disappeared.

Electro, that we were managing, and the original concept was that we would be the permanent managers of Electro; there were some politics involved. It was decided by somebody back in IEEE headquarters that perhaps this management contract should be put up to bid instead of just renewing every three years as we did to make what changes were necessary in the national financial situation, and so on. They turned it into a competitive situation and took it away from us. Electro then suffered a problem of a different management organization every year, because the ones that bid for it and got it found they couldn’t run it. So the next year it was somebody else. Electro never came to its former prominence.

Vardalas:

Oh, I see. So it’s still running under those conditions?

Angwin:

It’s still running, but you have trouble finding it. Sometimes it’s in New Jersey, sometimes it’s in New York, and sometimes it’s somewhere else, very small. But it’s no longer the prestigious show and convention sharing that with Wescon.

Shows and Regional Specialties

Vardalas:

So these regional tradeshow/technical shows reflected the regional specialty of the electronics industries, essentially?

Angwin:

Eighty percent of the attendance at these shows came from within 500 miles of the show. Now, a 500-mile circle around San Francisco and another one around Los Angeles barely intersects, but does intersect, so there’s flow between the two. The same did not exist between Chicago and Dallas, and that was one reason that it disappeared.

Vardalas:

But between regions, like between Northcon and Wescon, they were too far apart? They were mostly within their own region.

Angwin:

That’s right. Yes. Now Northcon, between Seattle and Portland, very close. One year in one city, the next year in the next city; the same people attended both. You had the same thing in New York and Boston. Boston is close enough to New York that for a major show and convention, and we’re talking about attendance in the order of seventy to eighty thousand people.

Vardalas:

Really? A regional show?

Angwin:

Yes. That’s what these shows are.

Vardalas:

So no one ever thought of a national show to bring all of these regional specialties together and run it; it would be too huge.

Angwin:

No, because there’s too much vacant space between them. You’ve got concentrations in areas, and that concentration can draw eighty percent of its interest from that area. The other twenty percent comes from the world—and I mean the world—both in exhibitors and attendees. We have attendees from Germany, from England, from Ireland.

Vardalas:

And they would choose whichever region they would go to depending on what they thought their interests were in terms of electronic specialties?

Angwin:

To a certain extent, yes. Now, Wescon is not highly specialized; it is not what is called a vertical show. That is, it is not a show on fiber optics; it is not a show on networking. It is called a horizontal show. It covers components, systems, production and packaging, computers, peripherals, management. It covers the broad field. Therefore, although it is centered in one area, there is a slight concentration of that area in the show, but it still is…

IEEE and ECI

Vardalas:

So IEEE now essentially, it’s still being run here from the IEEE counsels here?

Angwin:

Yes. At the present time, Wescon is the biggest show that we, ECI, produce. We own it. We also happen to own Northcon, because at the time that the Portland and Seattle sections got together, instead of getting into the political organization necessary to run it up there, they said, “Hey, why don’t you politicize it too, and run it as if it belonged to us, but you can own the name, you can own the logo. But you take out of it what would normally be your management contract if we owned it, and give us the rest.” And we did. So it’s not unlike the others, unless you really look at it with a fine-tooth comb. Incidentally, it has three sponsors participating in it, and three beneficiaries from it. IEEE is only one of them. ECI, then, is a separate corporation. In setting it up, the committee that decided the manner in which ECI would be organized and operate a memorandum of agreement which involved IEEE headquarters, Region 6, the San Francisco Counsel, and the Los Angeles Counsel. By a memorandum of agreement of those five groups, the very first item in that memorandum says it shall operate as a separate corporation, not as a part of the IEEE.

However, at the present time, IEEE is the only stockholder in it, if you think of the ownership in the form of stockholders. It’s the San Francisco and Los Angeles Counsels, which are part of the IEEE. That is an interesting thing, because, as a side issue, two years ago, through some manipulations by the IEEE staff and the Board of Directors at that time, they placed a demand on us to dissolve the corporation and turn it over to the IEEE. The IEEE, then, would have all of the financial activities and control all of the personnel, but the responsibility for running the thing, for developing the show, for running the show and so on, would still rest with the group that then used to be the corporation ECI.

Vardalas:

That seems unfair.

Angwin:

Yes, that’s right. We said, “In a pig’s eye!” That’s not the first time the IEEE Board of Directors has said, “Who is that group out in Los Angeles that’s making all of this money, getting all this publicity, and so on? We can do it just as well. Bring it back in.” Then they discover that they haven’t the iota of ability to run a tradeshow, which is the heart of the whole thing. It operates by virtue of the tradeshow. But the benefit is to the technical society. If the technical society is going to run a tradeshow, they had better know how to do it. The few times they have tried to do it have been dismal failures, including Electro.

Vardalas:

That’s interesting.

Significance of Wescon and Difficulties

From the time this concept started until now, obviously you think it has been very beneficial for the industry and very beneficial for the profession, this coming together.

Angwin:

Yes.

Vardalas:

Can you say more about how significant you think it has been? The people, the technical side, do they really think they have gotten something out of this? Or is it the tradeshow people who think they have gotten the most out of this?

Angwin:

It varies back and forth, and I’m not sure that anybody really sits down and worries about that sort of a question. It has been so successful that many other shows have spawned out of Wescon, including COMDEX. NEPCON was a part of Wescon at one time, and withdrew from Wescon and formed themselves. They’re having a little trouble now. COMDEX is in trouble right now. They are in bankruptcy.

Vardalas:

Oh, the bubble burst on them, too, did it?

Angwin:

The bubble burst. We are having difficulty. We have set certain levels of numbers of booths that we feel are necessary for us to really do a good job and to turn a significant cash benefit over to the two counsels that are involved. That cash benefit is in the order of $100,000. You’ve got to make a profit to do that, and our crossover point from zero to a profit we haven’t reached yet, and the show is only a couple of months away. We are having the same difficulty that all tradeshows at the present time are. There isn’t a one that isn’t having that difficulty.

But Wescon has been recognized pretty much as the granddaddy of all tradeshows. It was the first one to use “con” as part of its name. You look at the various tradeshows and conferences that go on now and see how many use the “con,” which we’re rather proud that they’ve copied us, to that extent.

Vardalas:

I see. Okay, I think that gives me a good initial understanding. Let me shut this off now.

Wescon and the Movies

Angwin:

Let me show you some things. There was one of the really classic films, The Glass Menagerie, that Warner Brothers produced. One of the key scenes in that film was a conversation between two actors in front of a fireplace. They wanted to photograph both the actors and the fireplace in a single frame, so that you saw the dancing flames, which were the only illumination in the room, and you saw the faces of the actors. A very dramatic scene. But the film was not sensitive enough to give the proper lighting to the actors. They had to use arc lights or very large incandescent lamps in order to do it. The question was how do they synchronize the lighting on the faces of the actors with the flickering of the fireplace, which was flickering all over the place, it wasn’t just a steady flame?

Vardalas:

So they wanted the faces to portray the lighting from the fireplace and not the ambient lighting around them?

Angwin:

Right.

Vardalas:

So they came to Wescon?

Angwin:

So they came to us. I happened to take that challenge, and put together a sensor that sensed the light output. It looked at the flames and it controlled the incandescent lighting in synchronism with them. It went really well. There have been a number of occasions like that.

Vardalas:

Where the movie industry came to you?

Angwin:

Yes, when the movie industry either came to us, or came to key members of our activity to help them develop new techniques or solve problems. But they have never really been a part of ECI or the IEEE activity.

Vardalas:

Because I’m wondering today with all this electronics and digital equipment that they’re using now in the movie industry, do manufacturers come with these products to these shows to put them out, or are they so select that they do this one-on-one?

Angwin:

They pretty much do it one-on-one. The movie industry is very interesting in its development. Since the computer became a usable tool, the motion picture industry has really developed into an electronic user that was never foreseen in the past. There are films nowadays that you will swear were photographed that actually are computer simulations. The motion picture industry has its own organizations that do that. One of the biggest and the best is up in the San Francisco area.

Vardalas:

Okay. All right, good. That was just for my own curiosity.

[Tape paused]

Lawrence Livermore and Berkley Labs

Angwin:

…for serving where the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkley Laboratory.

Vardalas:

Oh, you were? Oh, because he was at Lawrence Berkley, not the Livermore.

Angwin:

Yes. I’m a graduate of Cal Berkeley. While I was a student, I worked under Lawrence in the development of the cyclotron and the building itself up on the hill above it. Then later, during the wartime at GE, I was involved in nuclear activity. GE had contracts. I spent a good part of my time at Oakridge in Tennessee and in Fermilab in Chicago, and Santa Fe and Los Alamos and Albuquerque. But that’s not what we were talking about. Much of that still has not been declassified, so I could tell you all kinds of stories, but I can’t.

Vardalas:

Because I’ve had access. I’m writing a book now on the history of supercomputers at Control Data Corporation. I’ve got stacks from Livermore Labs now. James Norton comes up a lot, because he pushed to have a Control Data computer at Livermore, at Berkley. He was the first one. He also, along with another firm, happened to have an investment club, and they had bought Controlled Data shares.

Angwin:

Unfortunate.

Vardalas:

Unfortunate for them, early on.

[Tape paused]

Article, Photos and Fred Terman

Angwin:

I wrote a running article in The Los Angeles Bulletin. The purpose of that column was to advise the members of the LA Counsel of the benefits of the Los Angeles business office of the Counsel, the publication, the bulletin of the counsel, and their participation in Wescon. As such then I wrote a chronology of the development of the LA Counsel, of Wescon, of ECI, and that is this. So that is a compilation of the two years.

Vardalas:

Oh, okay. I see. There you are. That’s amazing. Can I get a copy of this?

Angwin:

You can have that.

Vardalas:

Oh, thank you very much. I’ll pass this on to the staff at the History Center. We’ll file this. We should keep this in our library.

Angwin:

Well, it’s not up to date. It stops about seven or eight years ago.

Vardalas:

Well, we’re a History Center, so we don’t have to be too worried about the present!

So now this, in terms of primary material, how far back are your records going now in terms of documentation?

Angwin:

Well, it depends of what you mean by records.

Vardalas:

Well, I mean letters, memos, correspondence, minutes—anything that you have that touches back. Oh my, look at this.

Angwin:

Well, here are the corporate files of ECI, Electro, Indicon, Midcon, Northcon, Southcon and Wescon—the various shows that we’ve produced. Here’s a sample committee manual for Wescon. We have some additional copies of that. I’m a saver. My cars won’t go in the garage because there’s too much junk in the garage. One of the things that I like to save are photographs. I have thousands of photographs. I have boxes like this full of 8x10 glossies. What happened was that over the years of Wescon, we’d cull the files and update them. Anything that was photographic I took home rather than scrap.

Vardalas:

Do you have names on the back of these? Or do you know them from memory?

Angwin:

I do on most of them. This one, Fred Terman. He wrote the classic electronic engineering textbook in the ‘40s.

Vardalas:

Was he the Stanford Provost?

Angwin:

He was the Stanford Provost and Engineering Dean, and he is really the father of Silicon Valley.

Vardalas:

He and Hewlett Packard were together in the beginning. Was he the one you were referring to, the guy from Stanford?

Angwin:

Yes. He was a supporter of Wescon and a frequent participant in Wescon. He’s talking here during one of our Future Engineers show activities at Wescon. Dave Packard.

You talked about motion pictures. Amanda Blake who was Kitty in Gunsmoke. Her husband is a famous actor and she was a very controversial.

Vardalas:

But now what was the context of this picture?

Angwin:

This was a preparation for a fashion show as part of a luncheon for the women attending Wescon.

Vardalas:

Really? And you got those people involved?

Angwin:

Oh, yes. That’s Chicago.

Vardalas:

Among all these, will there be shots of the actual tradeshow floor and products and people?

Angwin:

I’ll show you those in a few minutes, yes.

Vardalas:

And who is that elderly gentleman here?

Angwin:

That’s Millikan.

Vardalas:

Millikan? Oh really? This is Millikan!

Angwin:

He was involved.

Vardalas:

My, my. Look at that. That’s extraordinary. They’re all of this quality, this size?

Angwin:

Oh, yes.

Vardalas:

That’s amazing.

Angwin:

Governor Pat Brown of California; and Governor Fanon, the governor of Arizona during one of the Wescon shows.

Vardalas:

Looks like they’re showing a crystal lattice.

Angwin:

Yes. The President of IRE at that time. I’m not getting the key people that you might want to see here.

Vardalas:

Well that’s all right; I’m just getting a sense of what’s here. Is this representative of what’s in the other boxes, a cross-section?

Angwin:

Yes. This was one of our banquets. The keynote speaker there was the President of RCA, who followed Sarnoff. Governor Fanon again.

Those women again.

The mayor of San Francisco shaking hands with the president of IEEE; I happened to be between them.

Mrs. Terman and Dean Watkins.

Vardalas:

Is that a traveling-wave tube?

Angwin:

Dean Watkins was at that time a professor at Stanford, then later formed his own company and built Traveling Wave.

Vardalas:

Yes, that’s what I was saying, a traveling-wave tube. Oh, fantastic. Oh my, this is quite the treasure trove.

Angwin:

John Ryder, who was at one time an official in IEEE in New York. This was our opening of Wescon one year at the LA Sports Arena. We had a weather balloon tethered with a steel wire on which a laser was focused. We sent a signal around the world to trigger the laser to cut the wire to send the balloon up to signify the opening of Wescon that year. Everything went fine, except the signal that went to Goldstone and went on NASA’s tracking network around the world came back to Goldstone to a Western Union office in downtown Los Angeles, who then was to send the signal here. But the clerk didn’t recognize what it was in the Western Union office, put it in an envelope, and gave it to a bicycle messenger to deliver to us. We sat there waiting for that thing to go.

Vardalas:

So did the bicyclist arrive there?

Angwin:

No. Actually, after the time it should have gone, we had another switch which we closed and we sent it off. The bicyclist did arrive, but by then the crowd had gone, and very few people know that it didn’t really work. We grew so big that we had to use the grandstands of Hollywood Park Racetrack for part of our exhibit. Early walkie-talkies.

ERA, More Photos and Famous Faces

Vardalas:

Let me ask you a question while we’re talking about this. When the tradeshow people like ERA were involved, did they ever express their views as to what kind of technical things should be going on—what they’re interested in doing; what kind of technical subjects should be emphasized at a talk?

Angwin:

Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, the technical program is put together by these people. We would send out a call for papers. We would also appoint session leaders who had the responsibility, then, of developing or culling out of what came in, proper papers. The speaker, then, had to give an abstract. It went through a technical review and was either accepted or rejected. It then became part of the technical program. The author then provided a full written document which was registered in the Library of Congress and which we copyrighted, and turned the copyright after its presentation at Wescon over to the author.

Vardalas:

So what I was wondering, is the ERA representatives of that segment of this enterprise, did they have a voice in saying, “Why don’t you guys have technical papers in this area? We’d love to know more about this.”

Angwin:

Yes. They had a minor voice in it, yes. They, of course, were application-oriented rather than research and development. So their voice always was application-oriented, which we listened to but did not take as 100 percent. A feature of our show for many years was a Future Engineers show, which was a show within a show, in which science fair winners from all over the country would bring their projects and explain them and present technical papers on them and exhibit them. These pictures are a bunch of those science fair kids.

Vardalas:

That’s quite the collection.

Angwin:

Let me go a little bit further here. This may be one that you’d find a little more interesting. Edward Teller. I worked with him at Los Alamos for a while.

There is Terman.

We had two scholarships for that Future Engineers show: one was the Terman scholarship; the other was the De Forest, the inventor of the triode, who happened to live in the area at that time and became deeply involved.

Arnold Beckman.

This was the editor of Electronics Magazine, Bob Hill, who always attended our shows and became interested in them.

This was the largest tent in the world at that time. The automobiles are so small you can hardly see them here.

Vardalas:

Yes, and that’s where things were kept inside there, the tradeshow?

Angwin:

That’s where a portion of the tradeshow was. The rest of it was in here and Hollywood Park. We had over 1,200.

Vardalas:

Oh, my. Did people ever say that this is getting too big?

Angwin:

Yes. One of our big problems was as it became big we had to segment it into sizes. So if you had interest in certain areas, you could identify those areas and there was a concentration of your interest in that area.

Vardalas:

Right. But sometimes you get so specialized they’re running in parallel— everything’s going on at the same time, right?

Angwin:

Everything’s going at the same time, and you decide what you want to see. We have an index that will help you come up with that; we’ll print it out. Bill Pickering, Director JPL, who was the father of the space program, he happened to be Chairman of the Pasadena section, which was part of the Los Angeles counsel, and was a great supporter of Wescon.

Vardalas:

Right. That’s the tradeshow floor?

Angwin:

This is an early tradeshow. That’s the main floor of the auditorium in San Francisco, a small portion of the tradeshow.

Vardalas:

Yes, a lot of audio.

Angwin:

This is the first Wescon.

Vardalas:

The first Wescon? Oh, I’m just looking at who’s exhibiting.

Angwin:

At the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

Vardalas:

Yes, fascinating.

Angwin:

Major speaker one year.

Vardalas:

MacArthur?

Angwin:

Yes. He and Omar Bradley gave a talk on electronics in the military as part of our activity. He had just been declawed. This was one of the first speaking engagements after that. Ronald Reagan, another of our alumni.

Vardalas:

Oh, really? Now why is he an alumnus? Because of his role in California as governor? Or is there something deeper than that?

Angwin:

He happened to work for me at one time.

Vardalas:

Really, he worked for you?

Angwin:

When he was President of the Screen Actors’ Guild, he was also a feature on the GE Theatre, on both radio and television. General Electric had a contract with him for all of his time except for thirteen weeks. Thirteen weeks he was a free agent. The rest of the time, he worked for GE. He was the major actor in many of these radio and television shows. He also spent a lot of time traveling around the General Electric plants. He was an actor. He was President of the Screen Actors’ Guild at that time. He had in his mind that maybe he could do something as a governor, and he was forming his plans to become the Governor of California. Now as a GE employee, then, my department happened to be the one that was easiest for him to affiliate with, and therefore he was on my payroll. We became good friends. We built a house for him out in Pacific Palisades, an all-electric house.

This again is a floor shot that might be a little interesting. You notice these?

Vardalas:

What are those?

Angwin:

Those were developed by an artist for us, a fellow named Artsy Bashoff.

Vardalas:

It’s a globe of the world.

Angwin:

That’s a globe of the world, a stylized globe of the world.

Vardalas:

Hanging over the top, yes.

Angwin:

And he also did a number of them in satellites and spaceships.

Vardalas:

They look like clouds moving. It’s interesting. On the bottom, there’s the moon.

Angwin:

Yes. This was the floor of the Cow Palace in San Francisco where we had it at one time.

This was the Mayor of Palo Alto demonstrating a television via telephone; the year then was 1955. Most people think that’s fairly new.

Vardalas:

1955, and how was the transmission?

Angwin:

The transmission was very good.

Vardalas:

How was the transmission done? Over the telephone line?

Angwin:

Over telephone lines. I don’t know how they accomplished the bandwidth, but Bell Labs did.

Vardalas:

Oh, this was a Bell Labs thing?

Angwin:

Yes.

Vardalas:

Oh, how interesting.

Angwin:

And Noel Porter, incidentally, was on the ECI Board of Directors. He’s the fellow here. He’s Vice President of Hewlett Packard. Another shot of that tent and the Sports Arena.

Vardalas:

Yes. Oh, what is this one here? These are the students now again?

Angwin:

Again, students.

Vardalas:

Yes, okay, I see.

Angwin:

There’s that fashion show. There’s Amanda Blake in the fashion show. Mary Tyler Moore was also one of our key women.

Vardalas:

Now, is this because of the connection with GE that you would get them here, or they were just part of this?

Angwin:

By that time, Wescon was a big event here in the Los Angeles area. She was a fledgling star, and you might say she became the queen of the show that year. This was Hetta Hoffer, who participated in the fashion show activity.

PSA was a commuter airline at that time that tied San Francisco and Los Angeles together, and they ran special flights for us at Wescon. We had a night in Hollywood as the theme at one of our activities. The orchestra was Lawrence Welk’s orchestra. These were actresses.

Vardalas:

Oh, quite glitzy.

Angwin:

Except the Vice President of Hewlett Packard.

Vardalas:

Is that him sitting on the floor there?

Angwin:

Yes. That’s Bob Bonefice, who was Vice President Marketing, Hewlett Packard.

Vardalas:

Wow.

Angwin:

Another shot of Mary Tyler Moore. This is Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, and their wives. Here’s another of Artsy Bashoff. That particular one ended up on the cover of Time Magazine.

Vardalas:

So this was like…

Angwin:

It was three-dimensional, yes.

Vardalas:

Looks like the Boeing Syncom satellite was on there. Is that what it is? Or some representation of it?

Angwin:

It’s an artist’s stylized version of space at that time.

Vardalas:

That’s fascinating, because he’s got the camera looking down. How fascinating. Now, if you were to think of those legal-sized boxes, the kind you put documents in, how many would you say you have?

Angwin:

Oh, four or five.

Vardalas:

Oh, that’s quite a few.

Vardalas:

A lot of them. There’s a lot of duplication, too.

Vardalas:

Yes, but you would say there could be 1,000 photographs, you think?

Angwin:

Oh, easily.

Angwin's Archive

Vardalas:

Easily. Okay. Now going back to your records here, do you think you’d have any kind of early correspondence where you’d have Hewlett and you’d have Terman, people writing about how we have to get this going? Do you have anything that would touch to the origin?

Angwin:

I’m sure that I can put my hands on that sort of thing relative to the show. I’ve got some personal letters from Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Simon Ramo, Bill Pickering.

Vardalas:

That relate to this organization?

Angwin:

But they don’t relate necessarily to the show. One or more might congratulate us on a good show or something of that sort.

Vardalas:

Do you have any documentation about the kinds of tension that existed between IEEE headquarters and out here, over this kind of let’s take it over?

Angwin:

Oh, I don’t know. I might. This right here is documentation of current tension.

Vardalas:

Oh, okay. Well that’s too recent.

Angwin:

And I’ve got counterparts of that that go back fifty years, so yes.

Vardalas:

Because I’m thinking in terms of an historian trying to write an institutional history, how your material could someday in the future contribute to that kind of thing.

Angwin:

You might get some of that from that series of articles I wrote, and that might stimulate some thoughts in your mind. We can communicate further on that.

Vardalas:

Okay.

Angwin:

Let me bring you out here and answer another question you had.

Vardalas:

Now what is all this?

Angwin:

These are programs of Wescon, Electro and so on.

Vardalas:

Oh, so you have all of the programs?

Angwin:

I’ve got all of them. Wescon ‘79.

Vardalas:

Electro, you’ve got Electro, too?

Angwin:

Electro ‘81. These are photographs at shows.

Vardalas:

Oh, bound? So you put it in little binders then?

Angwin:

This is Wescon ‘84.

Vardalas:

Oh, I see. These are formalized and put on a kind of cardboard. When was it printed?

Angwin:

We had a photographer at every show who photographed the show like this, in general photographed items of interest.

Vardalas:

And how would you use this document? Would you use it as part of a promotion?

Angwin:

He then would seal them and he’d make an album for me. But the reason he was at the show was to provide photographic coverage for the exhibitors. They would contract with him to photograph their booths or their presentations of certain things, or whatever. These aren’t in any special order.

Vardalas:

That’s quite considerable. You must have at least thirty or forty binders up there.

Angwin:

Well, of that sort. I’ve got this sort of binder down here.

Vardalas:

Oh, gee, yes. Forty or fifty binders.

Angwin:

I’ve got some here. I’ve got some in the cabinet back there. Here are some more down here. This happened to be Midcon. Here are general shots of the shows, of individuals, of exhibitors, of speakers, of entertainment that we provided. It’s a photographic history, pretty much, of the shows. This collection is the only one of those subjects.

Vardalas:

That’s quite the interesting and, I would say, important collection. Same one?

Angwin:

I guess that’s another volume of the same show.

Vardalas:

What else was I going to ask you about the documentation? I’m thinking of the hard copy stuff that you have. Because the photographs are great—they are very fascinating.

Angwin:

I told you that we managed shows. Indicon, that’s in Indianapolis, and it was a tradeshow, actually, of the ERA and IEEE sections in the Indianapolis area. We produced it for them for two years, and this was one of the years. Their Board of Directors in the opening, and an overhead shot of the show. A very small show. It really couldn’t sustain itself. It costs money to produce a show, and unless you can get a large audience and a lot of exhibitors who are willing to pay $1,000 a booth, it won’t make it.

Vardalas:

Would the music industries come to Wescon, too? Like a recording industry for equipment for sound recordings and all that kind of thing? Or were they also like the media and just stayed away?

Angwin:

No, usually not. The manufacturers of that equipment would come to us. But the industry itself wouldn’t necessarily.

Vardalas:

Right, that’s what I meant. The manufacturers displayed those kinds of products?

Angwin:

Oh, yes. There’s a group in Grass Valley near Sacramento that specializes in that sort of thing.

Vardalas:

Oh, those are fascinating. Look at those, GE. The computer time-sharing service.

Angwin:

At that time, you couldn’t afford your own computer.

Vardalas:

Right. GE thought this was how they would make it back into the computer business.

Angwin:

Yes. This is ‘66.

Vardalas:

Yes, that’s right. Oh, you’ve got some close-up shots, too, of the various triggers. These are transistors, junctions, switching. My, those are a nice range of photographs.

Angwin:

The photographer made sure that GE was shown in here.

Vardalas:

Now, NTT. Was this the Japanese NTT or is this just another NTT? Because I couldn’t believe they would come. National Teletronics, no. This is Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. That’s what I was wondering.

Angwin:

I don’t think that’s Japanese, no. No, not them. Mallory Weston, they made meters. IBM.

Vardalas:

So foreign manufacturers would come to an exhibit here? Would Europeans or remote manufacturers?

Angwin:

They do at the present time, yes. About fifteen percent of our exhibitors are foreign. They come from Japan, Taiwan, China, England, Ireland, Korea.

Do you notice the cardboard boxes down here?

Vardalas:

Can I just look at one of those? Can I pull one of those cardboard boxes out, please? I’m just curious. This looks like an older one, ‘53.

Angwin:

Well, let’s see what’s in it. We’ll probably find it’s newspapers.

Vardalas:

Oh, is it like clipping files? Wow. So this is all printed matter.

Angwin:

These are photos.

Vardalas:

Oh, these are programs? Oh, these are the actual programs. Those are the programs there, too, right?

Angwin:

Yes. I’ve got complete sets of all of the programs. Oh, we happened to hit the 1960…

Vardalas:

Those ladies.

Other Publications and Meetings

So this is just all of the electronic news?

Angwin:

Not necessarily. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a special supplement during Wescon.

Vardalas:

Now what was the Electronic Daily? That was your own tradeshow magazine?

Angwin:

That was a daily during the show.

Vardalas:

Oh, you produced it? Oh really?

Angwin:

Oh yes. It was produced for us. This happened to be Hayden Publication.

Vardalas:

What kind of news would be in it? Just kind of what’s going on in the show? Who did what?

Angwin:

Hayden did it mostly for the advertising with program information.

Vardalas:

A bunch of articles in it? Oh, okay.

Angwin:

This did not replace the programs, but it complemented it and supplemented it. They usually had a feature article on what was coming up or what was being announced, that was unusual.

Vardalas:

So this one is about telemetry, I see. Okay. Okay, you’ve got quite a few of those in there, too.

Angwin:

The San Francisco Counsel and the Los Angeles Counsel combined their two activities in a grid bulletin: The San Francisco Grid and The Los Angeles Bulletin.

Vardalas:

And what did this contain?

Angwin:

During the August and September months, which were the hiatus months for the two Counsels. Those were the months in which Wescon occurred. So they combined their publications into a single publication featuring Wescon.

Vardalas:

Oh, okay. I gather your records would also have the administrative issues Wescon faced? You could find things in somewhere?

Angwin:

Possibly, yes. I do have some files in the garage on…

Vardalas:

Are there minutes of meetings, like planning meetings?

Angwin:

I’m not sure. Well, to a certain extent. Those minutes were actually printed in The Los Angeles Bulletin, and I have copies of the Bulletin. I also wrote the bylaws for Wescon and for ECI. The files on the bylaws are very full of that sort of a thing.

Vardalas:

I see. This is another example of this news. Western Electronic News, like for example this one here, was this just a magazine that came out at the time of a show?

Angwin:

Oh, yes. This was a national monthly trade journal. This one was published in Chicago. During Wescon, their issue, we would be the cover.

Vardalas:

Oh, so that’s why I see Wescon on the cover—it’s a cover issue.

Angwin:

Then Wescon was covered inside. They would list the exhibitors and their booth numbers, and there’s a floor plan in here.

Vardalas:

Yes, I see.