The story
Circuit Check was founded in 1978 as a spin-out of a printed circuit board drilling service bureau, "CircuitDrill." The initial product was test fixtures for bed of nails testers.
Over the following years, the company developed innovations for in-circuit test and functional test or FCT. One, the pneumatically actuated "clamshell" test fixture, electrically probes a circuit board from both sides.
The company also combined in-circuit test with functional test in the same test fixture in 2004, by developing (and patenting) the two-stage fixture having pins of two different lengths, and compressing to two different heights.
From Wikipedia’s article on Circuit Check, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5