Measurex Corp. - 1968 dated Specimen Stock Certificate

Specimen Stock printed by Security-Columbian Banknote Company.

Measurex was an American company based in Cupertino, California. It was one of the first companies to develop computer control systems for industry, primarily the paper-making industry. The development of the control systems included the development of control software, and development of scanning sensors to measure different properties of paper. The company was acquired by Honeywell in March 1997, at a price tag of almost $600 million. At the acquisition, Measurex had 2,250 employees in 30 countries and revenue of $254 million.

Measurex was conceived in 1967 by David A. "Dave" Bossen, then a sales manager at Industrial Nucleonics, and the new company opened its doors on January 18, 1968, in Santa Clara, California. It was first a garage set-up based on paper industry experiences (circa 1966) at 330 Mathew Street, but later moved several miles southwest to Cupertino to an old cannery property. Ground was broken for the 52,000-square-foot (4,800 m2) new headquarters in July 1971 and it opened the following year. Its initial public offering of 60,000 shares was completed on March 28, 1972, trading as symbol MSRX on NASDAQ. In 1973, a 20,000 sq ft (1,900 m2) plant was opened in Waterford, Ireland, in June and 41,000 sq ft (3,800 m2) was added to the Cupertino campus. The use of mini-computers was a part of the business plan, and Measurex initially used the Hewlett Packard 2116B mini-computer in the MX1000 (1968) and MX2000 (1974)systems. Later on, with the MX2001 systems (1977), Measurex used the 21MX mini-computer. In 1978, 127,000 sq ft (11,800 m2) was added in Cupertino, the Waterford plant expanded to 80,000 sq ft (7,400 m2), and a new 47,000 sq ft (4,400 m2) facility in Ireland was constructed in Cork. By the end of the year, nearly 1,000 systems had been installed in 25 countries and Measurex had more than 1,800 employees worldwide. Starting with the MX2002 systems in 1980, Measurex started to use the DEC LSI 11. Intel based system was introduced with the MX2002 Vision systems (using Intel 8086[8]) in 1983, but still with the LSI 11 as a Scanner Support Processor (SSP). The reason for keeping the older LSI 11 in the architecture, was the computer's ability of near real-time processing of gauge data and also the LSI 11's support for hardware interrupts. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurex

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