Bill Watry
Bill Watry was born on June 19th, 1941 in Waukesha County Wisconsin. Bill spent his childhood years on a dairy farm right on the shores of beautiful lake Michigan. Growing up on a dairy farm provided many opportunities for good honest hard work and a lot of experience with men and machines. Bill spent the summers of his teenage years working for the local cannery, and at a very young age was driving heavy equipment including “eighteen wheelers”, John Deere tractors, and crop harvesters. Some of those machines were real clever contraptions.
In High School bill found himself following the academic as well as the trades track. He took a strange mix of Metal shop and Woodworking as well as calculus and college prep courses.
Following high school Bill joined the United States Air Force. Instead of the promised career of flying Jets, Bill became the property of the United States Government. They needed Electronics specialist more than fighter jocks, so Bill spent one year in focused electronics school and got his start. Then on to Pakistan of all places to work in a detachment dedicated to nuclear detection using electronics surveillance equipment.
After four years in the Air Force, Bill worked for 2 Years with Ma Bell. He installed communications equipment at NORAD inside Cheyenne Mountain. The next move was up the street to the newly opened Hewlett-Packard Oscilloscope Division. Bill started as a production technician turning on scopes. His responsibilities over the years involved every aspect of developing and producing Oscilloscopes. He was a production engineer, a service engineer, a CE (maintaining all the numeric control machines), computer maintenance and a brief tour in the calibration lab.
Bill always knew he wanted to be in R&D so while working at HP and raising five children, he managed to get his degree in engineering at the CU extension in Colorado Springs. Bill graduated in 1975 and started working in the R&D lab. He was a firmware designer for the 1980A (the first microprocessor controlled Oscilloscope). That was followed by a tour in marketing, then back to the lab to write the firmware for the HP 54111A scope. Bill next worked on the Telecom mask projects for the 545xx series of scopes.
In 1996, Bill moved to the HP Loveland division where He worked on Data ACQ products like the 3497A, 3852A, and VXI.
After 35 years with HP/Agilent, Bill joined Complete Test. He has contributed to various projects. He retired in October of 2003, but remains an Associate of Complete Test.