This topic has sure mutated. Can't let it die now, I'll jump in with a bunch of random babbling, some I've done before, but hey, can't remember which topics. Senility, I suppose.
I posted a few days ago how horrible Win-based equipment was. Just what was anyone thinking? Maybe HP did get paid off my MS. XP was pretty atrocious, massively buggy, security issues all over the place. Both HP and Tek did good embedded sw, then went lame. OTOH, could be part of that move to outsource development, driven by clueless bean-counters. I transitioned from all HW to mostly all SW over my career, always fighting the 'we can hire 5 3rd-world devs for what we pay you'. Ok, do that, hmm, nothing works. So, still pay a real dev plus those 5 useless hacks. Bean-counters apparently can't figure out that they're paying 2x one good dev for 0.9 total output, since all the code has to be dealt with (rewritten) by the good dev.
Next rant, sw bloat. I ended up doing a lot of sw for telecom, massive servers, all in Java. Talk about bloated code, gigs of open-source libs, some dragged in just to get one trivial method. And, modern pseudo-devs have no understanding of hardware at all, and just as little understanding of basic sw algorithms, Just blindly use whatever they stumble across, then wonder why we needed a server farm to run what should have been possible on one machine.
Moving on, those DS 'top-hat' pseudo-nvrams. Who ever thought those were a good idea? 10 yrs, dead. I'm suspecting bean-counters again, make sure to obsolete the equipment. There's a guy selling ferromagnetic rams to replace said DS horrors for Tek scopes. Time to start doing the same for our HP stuff. And yes, my latest acquisition, 53310A, appears to have one of those damn things in it.
Have I run out? Of course not.
On to C vs C++. I really never liked C++, and don't get me started on C#. My definition of C++, a pseudo-OO variant done by someone that really didn't understand C. Stroustrup is on my hate-list. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of C, and still my favorite lang for embedded tiny stuff. I started with IBM 360 assembler (BALR sound familiar, waiting for responses to that), then Fortran, then PDP-8, PDP-11, Multics, Unix, Linux. Used Unix at Bell Labs early on. It is truly amazing how it has evolved.
Hmm, any more? Oh, wait, of course.....
Cheap instruments from China. All based on various US highly-integrated chips. Some of the stuff is useful. most is just junk. Amazing 'specs' in the ads. Any real test data? Of course not. Get some of them, Ok, yes, they do the basic operations, but, example, cheap signal generators, horrible purity and stability. About as much out-of-peak energy as is in the fundamental.
Finally, modern instruments of any kind.
What happened to the great engineering we used to have? Now it's all about design-to-cost. Selling points seem to be 'internet connected'. I'll stack my $300 5370 time-interval analyzer up against anything you can get today. GUI? Nope. Internet? Nope. Amazing? Yes. Same for my 54542, and still amazing even today, given what one costs vs new junk. BTW, friend of mine from college worked at HP instrument division, he's told me many a sad tale about the decline of HP. Blames one person, Carly.
In closing, maybe I can start another flame war. My 54542 is the first HP scope I'd ever considered.Everything else I now have in my home lab is HP, but Tek? scopes really dominated. I love my Tek 2465A, one of the last great analog scopes. My HP friend said they got tired of everyone complaining about the lame triggering performance of HP scopes, decided to do a 'Tek killer', and succeeded. True? Don't know. I do know that one of the early Tek digital scopes that I had used this what seems to me to be a total hack, linear CCD to capture the analog, then read it out slowly enough for the lame A/D to handle. And, I do know I just love my 54542. Well, until the already-fading CRT dies. At least it doesn't run Win. :)
Hope I've amused you,
Bill
Oh, and I want to put a plug in for some of the classic Brit engineering. My 2 Datron 4910 voltage refs used to be national-standard level. My Solartron 7081 8.5 digit meters rock (although it is sloooow at 8.5, and really isn't quite as good as a 3458A, but at a fraction of the price if you can find one. BTW, it didn't use the LTZ ref both the 3458 and my Datron 4910's used. It had a 'zero-temp-factor' Zener, selected, and then compensated more by a temp measurement, trimmed per-Zener to get the best zero TC. Love it.
