Last week during the IRE show when we visited ITT, we offered to send one of our key people to Parts to make sure the machine was set up right and in good operation condition. This person probably should be you. We don't want to have you spend too much time getting involved with the uncrating and some of the problems which you can't help any more than anyone else can. We probably should wait until they have the machine operating before you go, but, you should get there soon enough that you can be of some help.
Ben Gurley just came back from his trip to Paris and he has some rather disturbing news to report. Two weeks ago we had a call from ITT saying that there were mysterious intermittant troubles in the Paris machine which they had been working on for months and hadn't been able to track down. The machine never did work more than twenty-four hours at a time and our future sales of machines were dependent on making this one work satisfactorily. That same day we put Ben Gurley on the plane to Parls and the next day sent Al Blumenthal along so that they could fix the troubles and get it on the air.
The most significant problem they found were cold solder joints on the lugs which are used to solder transistors and some resistors. These units were made some time ago and I think at that time we were using very little heat on the lugs for some reason or other and if the transistor was held in mechanically, we felt that it was satisfactory. I hope that since then we have insisted on smooth flowing joints, on all joints, particularly these on the lugs. Tom Stockebrand who has just joined us today from Lincoln Laboratory also mentioned the fact that the only trouble they have had with DEC Modules were cold solder joints in the same places.
I am sending this memo on to you to make sure that you keep a close eye on these solder joints so that we never have this problem again.