In the mid 70's, there were only a few companies building such equipment. Also, at that time, chip development was most frantic. Behind the scenes the company was also developing a "wafer burner" which was no more than a long plexiglas tunnel where prototype silicon wafers where pulled into different gas chambers to burn in the layers of what made a chip work with such interesting gases as cyanide and such.
The workings of such machines took the tool and die manufacturing equipment to it's limits. The heavy machinery at this company were especially retooled to deal with the new tolerances of the "micro chip." Not only was it automated, but it was "micro" optimized.
I was hired as a "documentation assistant," to help the head technical writer. At first we just provided manuals for the wafer prober machines. The owners of this company of maybe 60 people decided that their upgrade of the heavy machinery was a significant product unto itself. I was given the task of documenting this new generation of "micro" machinery. I had to learn TTL logic language just to talk to the engineers who had developed the technology. I was left to my own resourses to develope and produce manuals for the programing of this new generation of heavy machine operation.
As well, as the Vapor Tunnel was in development for the production of prototype chips, I was given the task of producing detailed documentation of that product. I learned alot about poisinous gasses, silicon and layered chip technology.
