Roy Lewallen wrote:
These days, the features are decided mainly by marketers and upper
level managers, few of whom ever spent any time actually using a scope.

An un-named source working for H-P/ Agilent totally agrees with that!

He also added:
"The founder of Tek invented the triggered timebase and offered it to
Hewlett-Packard. Bill and Dave saw the value but were committed to doing
other things for their near future and suggested he start his own firm,
giving him some advice along the way."



--
73 from Ian G3SEK 'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
Editor, 'The VHF/UHF DX Book'
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek

"Frank Dinger" wrote in message news:...
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 , Tnx for your interesting comments.
What surprises me is that ,as you highlighted , ergonomics no longer seem
to be important in scope development.
Whereas in other industrial activities and product design ,industrial
designers pay a lot of attention to ergonomics.
Perhaps it is that modern scopes (and similar equipment) are designed by
nerds for nerds.
It also adds to the perception that one has to be a 'specialist' to
operate
and use this type of equipment ,which I fear is an ever increasing element
of modern marketing . A 'KISS' approach apparently does NOT bring in the
$$$.

Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH

This message sent a second time due to an earlier omission in the last line
Please note the added word : NOT

"Frank Dinger" wrote in message news:...
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 , Tnx for your interesting comments.
What surprises me is that ,as you highlighted , ergonomics no longer seem
to be important in scope development.
Whereas in other industrial activities and product design ,industrial
designers pay a lot of attention to ergonomics.
Perhaps it is that modern scopes (and similar equipment) are designed by
nerds for nerds.
It also adds to the perception that one has to be a 'specialist' to
operate
and use this type of equipment ,which I fear is an ever increasing element
of modern marketing . A 'KISS' approach apparently does NOT bring in the
$$$.

Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH

This message sent a second time due to an earlier omission in the last line
Please note the added word : NOT

In article , "Ian White, G3SEK"
writes:

Roy Lewallen wrote:
These days, the features are decided mainly by marketers and upper
level managers, few of whom ever spent any time actually using a scope.

An un-named source working for H-P/ Agilent totally agrees with that!

He also added:
"The founder of Tek invented the triggered timebase and offered it to
Hewlett-Packard. Bill and Dave saw the value but were committed to doing
other things for their near future and suggested he start his own firm,
giving him some advice along the way."

Well, I have no "un-named" sources, only the named ones. For two
interviews with Howard Vollum, co-founder of Tektronix, try:

http://www.infoage.org/oh-howard-vollum.html

Infoage is concentrating on the Signal Corps labs, most notably
Camp Evans, NJ (outside of Fort Monmouth) which became the
"Evans Laboratories," an adjunct of Fort Monmouth (along with
Coles and Squires labs outside of the Fort in the 1950s). Vollum
spent some service time at Camp Evans after overseas work on
radar in Great Britain. Vollum's interviews consist of one in 1955
and another in 1980.

There's some more at:

http://www.ohsu.edu/vollum/about.htm

There's also archive material from EE Times and several Tektronix
collector's web pages.

I don't find any reference to Hewlett-Packard, but more on the rivalry
with Allen B. DuMont and his oscilloscope company.

My own acquaintence is first with the 511AD model in 1954 while in
U.S. Army and becoming a supervisor on microwave radio relay
equipment. As far as I can recall, the sweep trigger of the 511 is
little more than a Schmitt Trigger circuit which was rather common
in pulse circuitry of the 50s. All of the first Tektronix scopes had
regulated power supplies which enabled the stability of the vertical
sweep to give true volts-per-graticule-marking information and for the
sweep rate to be calibrated with some precision. Whether in service
and maintenance or engineering design, the true information on the
trace is more important than whether or not the sweep trigger is
fancy (which it was, again, stable to use repeatedly thanks to the
regulated HV supplies). Add to that the "unblanking" of the CRT
while in sweep (blank screen during retrace) and the display is
quite natural and easy to use.

Having used a number of different instruments and scopes, I can't
agree with the "standard control arrangement" comments. Each
and every instrument has, to me, ALWAYS had some differences
which required attention to the bell and whistle control lay-outs.
This got worse by the 1970s when more and more function controls
were added to the front panels and the sizes of controls got smaller
and smaller. My fingers remained the same size...it got ridiculous
with the pointy little "keys" of the optional 7000 series (?) plug-in
for writing things on the CRT face...and the plug-in "spectrum
analyzer" modules from a company that Tektronix acquired.

Given the rather totally different function controls of today's DSOs,
it boils down to everyone needing to understand their instruments
FIRST before trying to use them. Ain't no such thing as "standard
control arrangements" when the controls don't apply to newer
functions.

Len Anderson
retired (from regular hours) electronic engineer person

In article , "Ian White, G3SEK"
writes:

Roy Lewallen wrote:
These days, the features are decided mainly by marketers and upper
level managers, few of whom ever spent any time actually using a scope.

An un-named source working for H-P/ Agilent totally agrees with that!

He also added:
"The founder of Tek invented the triggered timebase and offered it to
Hewlett-Packard. Bill and Dave saw the value but were committed to doing
other things for their near future and suggested he start his own firm,
giving him some advice along the way."

Well, I have no "un-named" sources, only the named ones. For two
interviews with Howard Vollum, co-founder of Tektronix, try:

http://www.infoage.org/oh-howard-vollum.html

Infoage is concentrating on the Signal Corps labs, most notably
Camp Evans, NJ (outside of Fort Monmouth) which became the
"Evans Laboratories," an adjunct of Fort Monmouth (along with
Coles and Squires labs outside of the Fort in the 1950s). Vollum
spent some service time at Camp Evans after overseas work on
radar in Great Britain. Vollum's interviews consist of one in 1955
and another in 1980.

There's some more at:

http://www.ohsu.edu/vollum/about.htm

There's also archive material from EE Times and several Tektronix
collector's web pages.

I don't find any reference to Hewlett-Packard, but more on the rivalry
with Allen B. DuMont and his oscilloscope company.

My own acquaintence is first with the 511AD model in 1954 while in
U.S. Army and becoming a supervisor on microwave radio relay
equipment. As far as I can recall, the sweep trigger of the 511 is
little more than a Schmitt Trigger circuit which was rather common
in pulse circuitry of the 50s. All of the first Tektronix scopes had
regulated power supplies which enabled the stability of the vertical
sweep to give true volts-per-graticule-marking information and for the
sweep rate to be calibrated with some precision. Whether in service
and maintenance or engineering design, the true information on the
trace is more important than whether or not the sweep trigger is
fancy (which it was, again, stable to use repeatedly thanks to the
regulated HV supplies). Add to that the "unblanking" of the CRT
while in sweep (blank screen during retrace) and the display is
quite natural and easy to use.

Having used a number of different instruments and scopes, I can't
agree with the "standard control arrangement" comments. Each
and every instrument has, to me, ALWAYS had some differences
which required attention to the bell and whistle control lay-outs.
This got worse by the 1970s when more and more function controls
were added to the front panels and the sizes of controls got smaller
and smaller. My fingers remained the same size...it got ridiculous
with the pointy little "keys" of the optional 7000 series (?) plug-in
for writing things on the CRT face...and the plug-in "spectrum
analyzer" modules from a company that Tektronix acquired.

Given the rather totally different function controls of today's DSOs,
it boils down to everyone needing to understand their instruments
FIRST before trying to use them. Ain't no such thing as "standard
control arrangements" when the controls don't apply to newer
functions.

Len Anderson
retired (from regular hours) electronic engineer person

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 12:56:45 -0800 "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

I am going to get myself a nice 2465B or perhaps a 2467 after finish school
and find myself a Real Job again -- in a sense those scopes seem like the
pinnacle of pure-analog scope development and even if they are only good to
400MHz, there'll continue to be plenty of designs that can be serviced by
such scopes for years to come.

I had to smile when I read this. I realize that there certainly are
jobs out there which require this kind of bandwidth, but I think for
the vast majority of us, 20MHz is more than enough.

I know that I often pull the 20 MHz bandwidth limit switch on my 465B,
just to quiet down the noise, and I actually have a 10 MHz scope which
is still extrememly useful.

It's nice to know that the extra bandwidth is there, but for almost
any servicing job (TV, radio, CD, DVD, audio...) 50 MHz is way more
than enough.

-
-----------------------------------------------
Jim Adney
Madison, WI 53711 USA
-----------------------------------------------

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 12:56:45 -0800 "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

I am going to get myself a nice 2465B or perhaps a 2467 after finish school
and find myself a Real Job again -- in a sense those scopes seem like the
pinnacle of pure-analog scope development and even if they are only good to
400MHz, there'll continue to be plenty of designs that can be serviced by
such scopes for years to come.

I had to smile when I read this. I realize that there certainly are
jobs out there which require this kind of bandwidth, but I think for
the vast majority of us, 20MHz is more than enough.

I know that I often pull the 20 MHz bandwidth limit switch on my 465B,
just to quiet down the noise, and I actually have a 10 MHz scope which
is still extrememly useful.

It's nice to know that the extra bandwidth is there, but for almost
any servicing job (TV, radio, CD, DVD, audio...) 50 MHz is way more
than enough.

-
-----------------------------------------------
Jim Adney
Madison, WI 53711 USA
-----------------------------------------------

(Howard) wrote in message . com...
Isn't free speech a wonderful thing? I followed the Tek thread with
interest and am wondering if the whiners actually:

1. Have a use for instruments of this caliber
2. Know how to use them properly

I have used Tektronix instruments for almost 30 years now, and don't
know how I could have got along without them. Most of my work has been
in commercial radio and television.

The manuals are written incredibly well, and I have received
assistance from tech support on devices more than 25 years old. Try
that with Hitachi, Leader or Phillips or Sony. And I could still get
parts for them!

I reflect with fondness on repairing a device like a waveform monitor,
more than 20 years old, and finding a small coil of silver solder on
the chassis in a place that was designed for it, tucked neatly in its
own "home." Tek has used silver solder for decades now...they have
always known it makes a better solder joint...and they want their
stuff to keep on working, 24/7 for years and years. So they put their
money where their mouth is, and provide the end user with what they
consider to be a lifetime supply (for that instrument) of the stuff.

And now I hear that they desroy their own equipment so they can sell
more new stuff?! Baloney.

I think I am hearing from people who not only do not understand that
"you get what you pay for," but have no use for the quality and
accuracy of the products they are complaining about.

Merry Chirstmas and Happy Holidays to all.

de WA2AFD
I worked for Federal government for about 30 years,last 10 years I did
acceptance testing and evaluation of government purchases, mostly
Tektronix scopes,out of hundreds of new scopes I NEVER FOUND ONE
factory defect..Only two or three that had minor shipping damage from
improper handling,like fork lift dents etc.. in these cases Tek
replaced them instantly ,no questions. I have been to tek plants many
times for seminars, technical training etc..One of the most respected
companies ever to operate in this country...Tektronixs is not just
scopes,they have done a complete line of test equipment,medical ,TV
broadcast equipment and many other lines. PLEASE,PLEASE lets get off
this subject..Harold W4PQW

(Howard) wrote in message . com...
Isn't free speech a wonderful thing? I followed the Tek thread with
interest and am wondering if the whiners actually:

1. Have a use for instruments of this caliber
2. Know how to use them properly

I have used Tektronix instruments for almost 30 years now, and don't
know how I could have got along without them. Most of my work has been
in commercial radio and television.

The manuals are written incredibly well, and I have received
assistance from tech support on devices more than 25 years old. Try
that with Hitachi, Leader or Phillips or Sony. And I could still get
parts for them!

I reflect with fondness on repairing a device like a waveform monitor,
more than 20 years old, and finding a small coil of silver solder on
the chassis in a place that was designed for it, tucked neatly in its
own "home." Tek has used silver solder for decades now...they have
always known it makes a better solder joint...and they want their
stuff to keep on working, 24/7 for years and years. So they put their
money where their mouth is, and provide the end user with what they
consider to be a lifetime supply (for that instrument) of the stuff.

And now I hear that they desroy their own equipment so they can sell
more new stuff?! Baloney.

I think I am hearing from people who not only do not understand that
"you get what you pay for," but have no use for the quality and
accuracy of the products they are complaining about.

Merry Chirstmas and Happy Holidays to all.

de WA2AFD
I worked for Federal government for about 30 years,last 10 years I did
acceptance testing and evaluation of government purchases, mostly
Tektronix scopes,out of hundreds of new scopes I NEVER FOUND ONE
factory defect..Only two or three that had minor shipping damage from
improper handling,like fork lift dents etc.. in these cases Tek
replaced them instantly ,no questions. I have been to tek plants many
times for seminars, technical training etc..One of the most respected
companies ever to operate in this country...Tektronixs is not just
scopes,they have done a complete line of test equipment,medical ,TV
broadcast equipment and many other lines. PLEASE,PLEASE lets get off
this subject..Harold W4PQW