Hazeltine Corporation

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Hazeltine Corporation was a defense electronics company which is now part of BAE Systems Inc.

[edit] History

The company was founded in 1924 by Dr. Alan Hazeltine. Historically, it has been located in Greenlawn although at times it had facilities in several other locations including Hauppauge, Riverhead, Huntington and its Wheeler Labs facility in Smithtown. The company originally concentrated on the manufacture of electronic circuits. Innovations in radio, monochrome and later color television allowed the company to grow. One particularly lucrative design was the AVC (Automatic Volume Control) circuit. This was such a useful feature that almost every AM radio made used this feature, under license from Hazeltine, from about 1930 until the patent ran out.

The company flourished into the 1980s as a US defense contractor with particular success as a designer and manufacturer of IFF systems. In the 1970s, as an outgrowth of its defense work, Hazeltine Corp. developed the nearly ubiquitous Hazeltine Terminal, an early monochrome computer terminal, eventually selling that line off to a short-lived third party called Esprit.

The Hazeltine terminal was notable in several ways: It had a particularly poor keyboard, with stiff keys placed at a high and uncomfortable angle. The screen display was stored in magnetic core memory, which maintained its contents even when the power was turned off. This made it trivially easy to see someone's password if they attempted to log on, failed, and then turned off the terminal in disgust. (True only on really old systems that used half-duplex or echoed the password, i.e. CDC NOS or KRONOS).

Hazeltine was acquired by the Emerson Electric Company in 1986. In 1990 Emerson demerged its Government and Defense Group (including Hazeltine) to form Esco Electronics Corporation. In 1996 this new company was acquired by GEC-Marconi, the defense subsidiary of The General Electric Company, and renamed GEC-Marconi Hazeltine.

With the 1999 merger of GEC-Marconi and British Aerospace to form BAE Systems, GEC-Marconi Hazeltine was renamed BAE Systems CNIR (Communication, Navigation, Identification and Reconnaissance). In a reorganisation the division was folded into BAE Systems Electronics and Integrated Solutions.