IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1523888
IPC COMMUNITY 17 SUMMER 2024 Please tell us about the history of PACE Worldwide. Eric Siegel: PACE was founded in 1958 by my father, Bill Siegel, a WWII veteran who maintained and repaired military radios. During the war, he oversaw radio communications, including the maintenance of electronics, and his interest in electronics, especially repair and maintenance, grew from there. After the war, he attended college on the GI Bill and became a mechanical engineer. He worked in small manufacturing in Silver Spring, Mary- land, and started the company after developing an electronics repair kit. Over the years, he wrote many white papers, and that led to professional development seminars with IPC. We distribute our products worldwide, doing business with foreign governments and multinational corpo- rations. We've had a long relationship with IPC, particularly when it comes to training videos. Beginning in the 1990s, PACE was a major spon- sor of IPC training videos, providing soldering instruction and technical expertise on 18 differ- ent productions. How did IPC connect with PACE for these videos? Eric: We have always been an extremely active member in terms of supplying technical infor- mation, writing, and data for IPC-7711/21, and we sat on IPC's Product Assurance Committee, working on repairability issues. In fact, when IPC first created training manuals and conducting training courses, we supplied a very large portion of the actual line drawings. We were very active in creating the images, verbiage, and techniques that were used in the videos. Then we started to work on the training videos ourselves. Mark Pritchard, IPC's video producer, came to Maryland and we collaborated on many vid- eos. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Mark. We also worked with David Bergman on certifica- Eric Siegel and Aaron Caplan