jonah-archive an hour ago

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.

Animats 4 hours ago

And, almost always, working and displaying traces.

Vintage Tektronix equipment is gorgeous inside. Ceramic terminal blocks. Silver solder. All resistor color codes facing in the same direction.

  • analog31 3 hours ago

    And a tiny spool of silver solder inside each unit, so you don't use the wrong solder for repairs.

  • stmw an hour ago

    Agree with all of the comments there - Tektronix gear were great examples of American engineering and manufacruting excellence.

  • hilbert42 3 hours ago

    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.

    • chaostheory 25 minutes ago

      Tbf cost has gone down dramatically for more functionality and features

  • gaze 2 hours ago

    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.

zzo38computer 42 minutes ago

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).

ChrisMarshallNY 4 hours ago

It's very "movie-friendly."

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).

  • chemotaxis 2 hours ago

    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.

  • bombcar 3 hours ago

    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.

blendo 2 hours ago

Back in the 80s, the Tek 4115 (color, 1280x1024) was so much fun for a young programmer working at RADC/Hanscom AFB.

Mandelbrot sets and Towers of Hanoi were so exciting to write in Fortran (I think Fortran 77), running under, iirc, CP/M.

cjx_p1 an hour ago

Why is this website requesting local network access?