Jim Adney wrote:

. . .

[Good comments]

. . .

Yes, I own several old Tek scopes. I consider myself a Tek youngster
as I've only been using them for about 35 years. I've got a nice new
one at work that only seems to weigh a couple of pounds and still does
300MHz. It takes me 20 minutes to figure it out every time I turn it
on, but I assume that's just because I don't turn it on frequently
enough.

There's another reason.

For a long time, scopes were designed by engineers who used scopes
daily, as their main tool. It wasn't any trick at all for them to select
features that were useful, and operation that was intuitive. These days,
the features are decided mainly by marketers and upper level managers,
few of whom ever spent any time actually using a scope. They're
implemented by software engineers, most of whom don't have the slightest
idea what a scope does or how to use one. Consequently, we can look
forward to a future of instruments that will be harder and harder to use
and understand, and won't have the feature set the user really needs.

I'll give you just one example, from the development of one of the first
highly digital lines of scopes. A mock-up had been created out of some
computer pieces, a display unit, and bits of this and that, so the
engineers could get a sense of how the new instrument was to use. I sat
down at the bench, and the first thing I did was to adjust the
horizontal position. I turned the (only) knob clockwise, and the trace
moved to the left. "Oh," I said to the software engineer who had
implemented most of the functions, "I see you've got that backward, but
that's easy enough to fix." "No," he said, "that's how I intended it to
work. It's logical: the delay increases when you turn the knob
clockwise." Pointing out to him that, logical or not, it would throw a
barrier in the way of every person who ever used the instrument, had
absolutely no effect on his certainty that his way was best(*). (And,
yes, I would have made the exact same argument that turning the knob to
the right *should* move the display to the left if the instrument were a
spectrum analyzer.) In this case, the project manager was a former
analog engineer, and he overruled the software engineer. But these days,
most management positions are filled with people who have seldom or
never actually used a scope, so more and more counter-intuitive, clumsy,
and useless features are showing up. Get used to it.

(*) In the '60's, when I was a technician, every place I went would have
a bunch of Tek scopes and one or two HPs. The HPs were just fine, except
that HP had insisted on making their own user interface. Where a Tek
scope would use a knob, they'd use buttons, and so forth, and the
controls were all put in different spots. We'd swear if we got stuck
with using one of the HPs, since it would take so long to figure out
where the needed control was and which way to turn it or which button to
push. So no one ever recommended buying an HP -- we all wanted Tek
scopes -- and as much due to familiarity as anything else. Then the
Japanese scopes came on the market. Y'know what? The knobs and other
controls were not only in exactly the same places as on Tek scopes, they
were even the same shape and color. We could pick one up and begin using
it right away. Y'know what else? Tek took a real beating from the
Japanese scopes, way worse than they ever did from HP.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL
Tek, 1974-80, 1984-95