Resotek was established in 1990 by three former employees of Schlumberger Technologies in Dorset, after another round of redundancies due to downsizing after the MoD started cutting back on new projects. We decided that the ATE being produced was too expensive for most companies, and thought we could design a useful system around a standard PC with IEEE instrumentation and/or custom hardware. We developed a demonstration system using a PC, VXI rack and IEEE interface, and this led to our being offered a specification for a production test system. We identified instrumentation and other components, and designed and built a system, and wrote a generic test environment and self-test program. The customer was sufficiently satisfied that they bought several more, and asked us to design two other systems, including one which tested up to 16 modules simultaneously. The systems were still being used more than 10 years after they were built. Building electronic systems became uneconomic after CE regulations meant they would have to be independently tested for RFI.
