ITS, then known as ITC, was founded in 1967 by Gary Himler and John Ahlstrom. Gary and John were the perfect team. Gary, a registered professional engineer, had extensive experience in engineering management, and John was......ITS, then known as ITC, was founded in 1967 by Gary Himler and John Ahlstrom. Gary and John were the perfect team. Gary, a registered professional engineer, had extensive experience in engineering management, and John was a hands-on engineer with exceptional technical skills. The plan was to build a company that could provide custom products for both commercial and government applications. And that they did. The approach was to design a "systems vehicle" which included a chassis, with power supply, and a library of logic cards which could be used to build custom products. For this task, John was aptly suited, having been Systems Manager at Computer Measurements Company for a number of years. In those days you didnt buy power supplies off the shelf, so design of a power supply that would provide all of the voltages that might be required in a system was the first order of business. And one of the voltages had to be high enough to power neon Nixie Tubes, which everyone used for numeric displays back then. The first product using the new systems vehicle was the Model 7010, Digital Comparator, built for Hughes Aircraft. A 5.25 inch high, 19" rack mounted box with 23 plug-in cards plus power supply and fan. And all it did was compare two applied binary numbers (parallel interface of course) and indicate whether one was above, below or equal to the other. That will give you some idea how things have changed over the past 40 years. Over the years ITC/ITS made several attempts to come up with standard products that could be sold to the general market but with little success. When a company is staffed by a bunch of engineers, making new things every day is much more fun than producing standard products. So all development was paid for by the customer and the company found itself in just about anything electronic. Products were seldom sold to anyone other than the original customer. Some of the areas in which the company found itself were: Data Acquisition Systems, Production Test Equipment, Ground Support Equipment, Simulators, Photo Instrumentation, Text editing (ITC built a text editor before anyone else, using Philips Audio Cassettes to store the data) and Video Instrumentation (more about that below). To get some idea of the diversity of products, here are a few early advertisement flyers.