Biographical Sketch of Ray Timmons

Ray was born and grew up in Florence, SC.  When born, his father owned and operated 
several grocery stores there.  He attended McKenzie Grammer, Poynor Junior High and 
McClenaghan High schools.  After graduating from the University of South Carolina 
with a BS degree in Engineering, he went to work with AT&T/Western Electric/Sandia in 
North Carolina as a Project Manager for Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) guidance set 
development and managed a computerized inventory system.  While in North Carolina he 
also graduated from UNC-Greenville with an MS degree in Business Administration and 
a two year intensive study of Integrated Circuit design and manufacture. During that busy 
time, he also meet and married his wife Barbara.

After the ABM project, hey then moved to work at the AT&T Richmond, Virginia plant.  
While in Richmond, Barbara and he had their only child Timothy.   The highlight of his 
career there was the development of the first laser plotter for electronic circuit board 
manufacture (equipment based on this technology is now the standard all over the world).  
He spent many months in California working on the first laser plotter at the company 
selected to build it, EOCOM.

They then moved to Newport Beach, California and became Technical Director at 
EOCOM.  His son and he watched the Olympic Bicycle race that went by the street on 
the other side of the hill behind their house and then ran back to their house to watch the 
finish on TV.  There was a bicycle trail by the house that went all the way to San Diego 
and they enjoyed using the trail. He traveled all over the world helping sell the new laser 
plotter technology. He once went to Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and 
Italy in one two week trip.   The entire family enjoyed trips Santa Catalina Island, 
Hawaii, Grand Canyon, etc. while in California.

EOCOM was purchased by Gerber Scientific, and he was one of the “lucky” few to move 
to their plant in Connecticut when they closed EOCOM. Surprisingly, they survived the 
first and only winter in Connecticut.  But one day, he decided he would really like to 
return to South Carolina, thought about what companies were there and determined that 
the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) plant in Greenville, SC would be ideal.   
Somehow, the next day DEC called him about working at their Greenville plant (this is 
absolutely a true story).  There he helped build a new state of the art, clean room 
production facility.  Also enjoyed a trip to Israel that included a visit Jerusalem and 
Bethlehem.  He was the chair of a National Science Foundation consortium that included 
IBM, Sandia Labs, Texas Instruments and IBM. But, the fun did not last as DEC went 
into financial decline and sold the plant.  He was the only person given the choice of 
staying with the new plant owners, or moving back north to another DEC site.  Not much 
of a choice with DEC in a death spiral and foreign competition that made it very unlikely 
for the Greenville plant to make a profit.  Stayed in Greenville for a while, then took a job 
at Texas Instruments in Austin, Texas until he left TI for his present job as the ISM 
Director at Aiken Technical College in Aiken, SC.