Heathkit Structure You may find interesting

[Don Peterson]

Someone was asking me how the various model numbers at Heathkit came about.
 Particularly, why were some "Factory Wired" items were indicated by adding
a "W" (IDW-4101) while some other were indicated with an "S"?  (SO-4510 as opposed
to IOW-4510 or SM-4130 as opposed to IMW-4130)

This sort of came about with the original structuring of the Engineering department.
 I remember that there were about six of them.

Audio Engineering (AA, AJ, AD, etc.)

Amateur Radio Engineering (HA, HD, HM, etc. ) "Ham" / "A" was already taken.
 I'm not sure of just where the "SB" line actually came from.  It was part of
the "Ham" group.

General Engineering which was sometimes affectionately referred to as the "toy"
department; this drove the manager of that group "nuts"!  (GC, GD, GR, GT, GW,
etc.)

Instrument Engineering (IB, ID, IG, IM, IO, IP, etc.)

Marine Engineering was short lived but established some of the "M" models before
it was combined into the General group.

...and the Scientific Instruments group.  The Scientific Instruments group originally
had all of the early "Berkley" instruments items.  They also offered factory
wired versions of some of the Heathkits.  They made a spectrophotometer that
was eventually sold to McPhearson Labs in the early 70's.  But that group was
also responsible for some of the oscilloscope designs which were designated
"SO" and some early frequency counters "SM".  Some items such as the SM-118A
never was available in kit form.  Personally, when I started working there,
it was on the SM-109A computing frequency counter (very rare) in the Scientific
Instruments group.  I was then transferred to the Kit Instruments group when
they sold off "SI".

So this is the reason that some wired kits are indicated with a "W" for wired,
while some kept a designation of "S" for Scientific Instrument Group.

Now many of the "real early" (even before MY time) kits just used an abbreviated
form of what it was.  Item such as "CB-1" (CB Radio), AG-9 (Audio Generator),
and GC-1A (General Communications) are very early items.

Just some nostalgia from an old Heathkit design engineer.....

Don

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