R&D Memories

This week in R&D Daily—R&D’s daily online newsletter—we’re adding links to “Pictures of the Day” and “25 Years Ago in R&D.” It’s interesting to review the news and technologies that were “hot” in April 1983. What comes across is that there are a lot of items about physical research and much less about life science research than there is today. That emphasis could be attributed somewhat to what the editors at that time chose to focus on, but I rather tend to believe that the research emphasis was stronger in 1983 on materials research, space technology, electronic test systems, and analytical instrumentation than it is today.

There’s little mention in the pages of the Volume 25, No. 4 issue of R&D about nanotechnology, DNA sequencing, or gene therapy—those topics didn’t really exist in the mainstream at that time. There is, however, mention of solar energy, smart HPLC, software-based simulation systems, and computer controlled SEMs.

I was more than slightly surprised about the large number of high-tech companies who advertised in the pages of R&D who are still in business and doing very well. Those companies include Omega Engineering, PerkinElmer (although it’s gone through some reorganizations in the interim), Labconco, Tektronix, Newport Corp., Hewlett Packard (the instrument division now known as Agilent Technologies), Nikon, Swagelok, Gilson, MKS Instruments, Data Translation, Shimadzu, Fluke, MDC, Waters, and more. The companies not mentioned include National Instruments (still basically a startup in a 10,000 ft² office at the time) and Thermo Scientific, which purchased many of those previous advertisers, including Fisher Scientific, Neslab, Nicolet, and others.

The instruments, test equipment, and labs look surprisingly similar to those seen today—maybe a little larger and with built-in keyboards as opposed to links to workstations or PCs. There are some pictures that include chart recorders which mostly disappeared in the 1990s and there’s no mention or view of flexible casework, but in many cases the pictures of some products like vacuum pumps SEMs, optical microscopes, and basic laboratory systems could be interchanged with those from today’s devices—very obviously the working components, performance, and operation of today’s devices are much superior to those of 1983, but they look very similar.

E-mail the editor