If you have the opportunity, I would strongly recommend visiting the vintageTEK Museum whose site this is on (it's just outside Portland) sometime. Many of the folks working there are retired from Tektronix themselves and the amount of (working!) equipment they have is astounding.
Yes! I went there on my first trip to Portland last year for work.
It was mesmerizing to look at all the beautiful equipment and meet all the cool people there. I've forgotten his name, but I spent at least one hour with an ex-Tektronix employee who started his career with tubes and ended it with writing FPGA code who told me many wonderous stories from his career. Highly recommended if you're at all into electronics!
And Tektronix equipment is absolute delight to work on. And I defy anyone to find better handbooks and maintenance manuals anywhere, they're absolutely marvelous. They should be held up as the quintessential examples.
I look at the shit tech manuals around these days (that's if they exixt at all) and can't help but feel how much tech companies have screwed users in recent decades.
Meanwhile, the DPO4054 I use at work has issues with half of the buttons, the data returned by some commands doesn't match the manual, and the probes from some newer scopes don't fit even though they all just use BNC?
Maybe the software on it is just outdated? Nope, the only version you can get from the Tektronix page is older than what is on the scope. And there are newer versions, but they are only for the DPO4054B and not the older DPO4054...
Yeah, but with modern equipment you can use it only strictly for what it is intended, and frequently not even for that, due to various bugs.
With ancient equipment, like the measurement instruments from Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard, due to having excellent maintenance manuals that allowed a perfect understanding of their internals, it was often possible to find ways to use them for things that had never been foreseen by their designers.
I prefer that very much to the modern instruments that may have a lot of additional features that I do not need, while the features that I do need may have annoying limitations that cannot be surpassed.
I hate the TDS2024 (early-2000s digital scope) with a passion. The LCD is awful, the power supply breaks all the time, and the sample memory is laughable compared to modern scopes, making it very difficult to use. Tektronix kept selling this thing (and similarly awful other ones) until not so long ago for an absurd price (~2000$). For some reason universities kept buying them instead of vastly superior ones from other companies. So now this piece of garbage is a absolutely everywhere.
I have a 556 and 547 that I still use. They work fine. They slowed down a bit from the resistors drifting but whatever. Still very fun to use and they heat the workspace in the winter.
HP stuff is too beige/bland. Tektronix stuff is more colorful.
Some of the Japanese brands were even more colorful, but we always used either Tektronix, or HP, where I worked (I used to write GPIB controller programs for them).
Some of the Tektronix CRT scopes had unique phosphor colors or compositions, so it adds a lot of extra cinematic flare.
https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Phosphor
It also is just the right era to fit a hugely wide range of periods - you can get away with them into the 20s or 30s if you're doing a bit of retro futurism, and they're not out of place even today.
There are just two photos in the entire gallery of 150+ that show modern scopes. The rest is vintage CRT equipment, going back to black-and-white films.
I just saw a picture of Maren Jensen, Athena in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica posing in costume with a Tektronix 4051 (1975) - I guess a very up to date piece of equipment at the time.
Great memories, I worked for a CAD/CAM company at the time.. as an intern. One of the problems they had was that they did not want to ship demoes of their system to certain countries as they had seen code be reverse engineered and stolen.
I made a demo suite that allowed for 3D renders to be played back in vector mode from the internal 4115 memory.
The feedback we got from the main office in England was not good: the demo made it seem that the system was capable of creating real-time rotation views of complex models.
Well, yes, it took several days to compute all frames but once I had the vectors the 4115 could show the frames at incredible speed.
They flew me to headquarters to explain how I got that to work and potentially incorporate a demo module into the system.
Company went sideways after that, I ended up in Cambridge at another startup in a similar but different space, they used Sun Workstations !
Good days.
It does not display the text; it just displays a mess. In my experience it sometimes does this when the file is compressed but the server does not tell you that it is compressed (I have also had the other way around happen; the server telling you that it is compressed even though it is not compressed).
It was mesmerizing to look at all the beautiful equipment and meet all the cool people there. I've forgotten his name, but I spent at least one hour with an ex-Tektronix employee who started his career with tubes and ended it with writing FPGA code who told me many wonderous stories from his career. Highly recommended if you're at all into electronics!
Vintage Tektronix equipment is gorgeous inside. Ceramic terminal blocks. Silver solder. All resistor color codes facing in the same direction.
I look at the shit tech manuals around these days (that's if they exixt at all) and can't help but feel how much tech companies have screwed users in recent decades.
I have learned more electronics from the Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix maintenance manuals from before 1990 than from most university courses.
With ancient equipment, like the measurement instruments from Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard, due to having excellent maintenance manuals that allowed a perfect understanding of their internals, it was often possible to find ways to use them for things that had never been foreseen by their designers.
I prefer that very much to the modern instruments that may have a lot of additional features that I do not need, while the features that I do need may have annoying limitations that cannot be surpassed.
HP stuff is too beige/bland. Tektronix stuff is more colorful.
Some of the Japanese brands were even more colorful, but we always used either Tektronix, or HP, where I worked (I used to write GPIB controller programs for them).
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-battlestar-galactica-1979-...
Mandelbrot sets and Towers of Hanoi were so exciting to write in Fortran (I think Fortran 77), running under, iirc, CP/M.
They flew me to headquarters to explain how I got that to work and potentially incorporate a demo module into the system. Company went sideways after that, I ended up in Cambridge at another startup in a similar but different space, they used Sun Workstations ! Good days.
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