Memorial ServiceSaturday, November 2nd, 3:30 PM Terzich & Wilson Funeral Home225 E. Rose, Sonora, CA(209) 532-3131 Graveside service Monday, November 4th, 2:00PMMission City Memorial Park420 N. Winchester Blvd.Santa Clara, CA 95050 It is with a heavy heart that I report that, according to informed sources, Tom Olson, the founder of Tomco and Olson Technologies among […]
Hamlin and converter were synonymous in the early days of set-top boxes that extended the capability of cable television beyond the limits of broadcast TV. Tom Olson talks of his relationship with this cable pioneer and how he preemptively helped him identify and fix a problem that would have been a serious issue. As a […]
“We would love to be on there in Frankfort, because we can’t get the signal there,” is what a Louisville television station is purported to have written in a 1951 letter to the organizers of the Frankfort, KY cable system. As someone who overlapped with one of the founders and a key driver of this […]
Filmed in December, 2016, Tom Olson discusses how he made his way from upstate New York to Santa Clara Valley and the contributions he and his cohorts made throughout the decades to the cable and telecommunications’ industries. The three plus hours of video that follows below touches upon a number of topics from discrimination in […]
Jerry Laufer describes his career from the early days in Oregon repairing televisions and building tube amplifiers for an early cable system to his days at Tomco, where he developed some of the first frequency modulation systems used for video transmission in cable television. Along the way, he worked with some cable luminaries, including Monty […]
Veteran telecommunications’ engineer and author, Jim Farmer, explains the process for the development of Scientific Atlanta’s 6350 modulator, which helped propel Scientific Atlanta as a leader in the headend space in the late 1970s and 1980s. He explains how he and fellow industry luminary, Alex Best, developed the 6350 largely based on what they had learned from […]
Cable industry engineering icon and SCTE Hall of Fame member, Jim Farmer, who retired in August after some 45 years of service to the cable TV industry, discusses some of the people who influenced his career. He also indicates that engineering organizations, such as IEEE and SCTE, were important to his growth as an engineer […]