Alwyn,
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You are quite correct, the military had stringent documentation requirements and they were willing to pay. Things have flipped indeed when it comes to dual use items. Nowadays, ITAR looms over the T&M industry, to the point that even data sheets for semiconductors are on the sparse side. Pictures of chips are blurred out with only bonding pads visible. Quite the opposite from what the military wanted during the cold war days.
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The T&M business is, relatively speaking, small. Keysight annual revenue is ~USD 5.5B. The environmental impact from this segment is tiny compared to the damage inflicted by bored consumers. Even so, some instruments are highly repairable via assembly replacement without any need for factory software or schematics. You can take a board out of one analyzer and plug it into another. What little calibration is needed does not require any factory software. The caveat is, you swap the whole board. From an industrial or military customer's standpoint, this is probably the best solution they can hope for.
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Vladan
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On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 01:54 AM, alwyn.seeds1 wrote:
Dear All,
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One of the issues has been change of customer requirements. Back in the HP Days, the US and other military customers did component level equipment repair; they therefore required complete service documentation, the structure of which was defined down to the typefaces to be used. Those customers met the very considerable cost of creating this documentation. Post Cold-War, the military customers changed their repair policy, the proportion of business that was military reduced and the manufacturers responded accordingly.
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We are very fortunate that both HP and Tektronix made much of the documentation available to all customers. Other manufacturers, such as Rohde and Schwarz, did not.
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Regards,
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Alwyn
