Pico Technology turns 30 years old

On July 3, Pico Technology celebrated 30 years of business. Pico’s oscilloscopes, data loggers and RF equipment are used by engineers, scientists and technicians around the globe to bring their products to market. Pico automotive diagnostics products help save time and money for vehicle manufacturers and service organizations on every continent, the company said.

“I am very proud of Pico and how we have worked hard with dedication to achieve 30 years of continuous growth," said CEO and owner Alan Tong. "To begin with, our aim was to make test equipment affordable for many hobbyists and small companies that couldn't afford traditional benchtop equipment. As things have progressed, we still look after hobbyists but our products have evolved to compete with the higher-performance test equipment that is used in mainstream electronics design, as well as in some very advanced technologies and by leading companies and research institutions."

Pico Technology was founded in 1991, the same year Intel introduced the low-cost 486SX microprocessor, priced at $258. It was implemented on PCs running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0. The World Wide Web Consortium was founded by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and the GSM mobile network was launched in Europe.

On July 3, 1991, Alan Tong and Mike Green co-founded Pico Technology. Initially operating from their then office in Hardwick, near Cambridge in the United Kingdom, Pico’s first product was the ADC-10, so called because it was an analog to digital converter and sampled at 10 kS/s. It connected to the PC via the parallel port. The first order for ADC-10’s was received in August that year, with two units sold for $68 each.

The ADC-10 was the world’s first PC oscilloscope, and in the years that followed, Pico notched up several more industry firsts, including the first oscilloscope with digital triggering and the first high-resolution oscilloscope, the company said.

Today, Pico celebrates continuous growth with sales growing year on year for 30 years with over 150 employees at its head office in St. Neots, U.K. and in Manchester, U.K., the United States, China, Japan and Germany. It now supplies more than 30 vehicle manufacturers worldwide.

“The company culture at Pico is key to our success," said Tong. “We treat customers as our friends, with free software upgrades and technical support for the lifetime of each product. Pico users are very loyal and have become strong advocates for our products amongst their colleagues. We treat our colleagues as our family and that is key to our very low employee turnover. Many of our team members have been at Pico for over a decade.”