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Re: "J" Plugin
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Hello Don,
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I enjoyed reading what you had to say. It was interesting but sickening at the same time, too. That business of marketing worrying about 'cannibalizing sale of existing line' makes me barf. The scope that you were describing, in a finished form, would probably make a market where those little Sonny/Tektronix jobs were trying to; I did not see many of them around, what probably means they were not selling. Those things always looked like something that I would put in a curio cabinet in my dinning room, not use as a scope. What a line was that, I just checked what was offered in 1987: two 5 MHz jobs and one each 1 MHz and 500 kHz. That was crowded in itself, but the line certainly could stand a 30 MHz scope. As for threat to 400 series, I do not think so. The 400s had a bigger screen, what counts for a lot when you need to see waveform. Besides, I have seen a lot of 465s used as low cost lab scopes, and I think that 453 and 454 enjoyed same popularity in labs, so their market was safe from assault of a 30 MHz pint sized scope. Unfortunately, in most industries the marketing often carried the day and a product line was milked well past its time. Come to think, maybe that was not all that bad, it gave a chance to competition to catch up. I wander if marketing did not know what to propose for new product and 'cannibalizing sale' was a good line to peddle, instead. On the opposite side of action is what some companies in computer industry were doing in early 90s, starting a rumor of a new system generation before the current one was released. Digital (DEC) was doing that job real well, they would paralyze customer by rumors of the next 'killer' performance system and because of that, number of their customers skipped more than one system generation. That mastery of marketing and dabbling in PCs brought them to ruin. I wander if anything got salvaged from that small scope. The CRT would have been something quite useful; I wander if Honeywell's CRTs benefited from 'nanoscope' development. The Honeywell had a CRT that was around 1" diameter and was used for projection to pilot's visor; I understand that Honeywell was a sole source and display systems were selling well. Those bit slice based processors that you are talking about, that is something that I always wanted to work with, but never had a chance. You could make anything with them; throw in microcode (and plumbing to cool it) and you had any computer you can imagine. I must have sinned, God sentenced me to work with Intel and RCA only. Could have been worse, too; at least I avoided Rockwell processor. When we are around next time, before we get to middle age again, you pay better attention and I will try those bit slice jobs. Regards Miroslav Pokorni ----- Original Message -----
From: donlcramer@... To: TekScopes@... Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 9:37 PM Subject: Re: [TekScopes] "J" Plugin Speaking of prototypes, I am fascinated by them, whether Tek or someone elses'. They represent someone's vision and generally also a lot of effort, so it would be nice if something of it could be saved for history. Homage to those that tried but failed I guess. Unfortunately, I have a rather small house to be collecting this kind of stuff. Hopefully at least the literature will end up with Stan for the future Tek museum. I vaguely remember seeing a few prototype products from my days at Tek (late 70's). One was the "nanoscope", which was shown at a yearly Tek Labs show (where the corporate guys got to see what the lab coats were up to). It was about a third the size of a 200 series handheld (the nanoscope that is, not the show--the show took up the entire Bldg 50 auditorium). It didn't get much further than a rough prototype I believe. And the CRT looked nice. Another was some pretty densely packed rackwidth size instruments which I was told were network analyzers. That was back when I thought a network was something that broadcast TV shows. I would love to hear the story of that effort (it was adjacent the Spectrum Analyzer group, part of Communications Division). Yet another was the 4054, which was a bit slice version of the 4051/4052 family desktop computers. Included a racy fast custom graphics processor, also bit slice based. I understood it had super, super fast hardware with real, real slow software. I was told the dozen prototypes were ultimately bandsawed in the Model Shop. :< Also something out of the young Digital Service Instruments (DSI) offshoot of Portables called the PET, which I think stood for Programmable Electronic Tester. A largish portable scope size enclosure with, I recollect, an 8085 based micro and a bunch of interface cards. As the name implies, you plug this box into your big system of some sort and it exercises it for you and tells you what's wrong. I think the problem was defining what it was going to plug into, and how was the specialized test software to be written? When the group moved, they left behind a bunch of neat prototype mechanical enclosure bits which I used to make G jobs out of. And there was an internal tool called the board bucket, a card cage microprocessor based computer system. I think it started as an engineering tool when the 6800 based 4051 was developed, but became an internal entity all it's own with cards, power supply, firmware, and engineering support. Another thing I came across in Tek Labs were 7K scope racks in the style of TM500. That is, they were nicely built cages with power supplies which took (6?) 7K type plug-ins. They had no CRT related hardware in them. Perhaps these were only made for internal use, and perhaps before the real TM500 series came out. I never saw them with real 7K plugins installed. Only 7K plugin mechanicals with custom hardware (like CRT test electronics) installed. They were real nicely made, heavy and robust mainframes compared to the TM500 equivalents, with regulated supplies in them like 7K scopes. I recollect the plug-in mechanical bits and the blank PCB were available in engineering stock for those which wanted to build something into them. I heard about, but never saw, some higher speed 200 series handhelds. I believe they attained 35MHz but had dismal battery life. The engineer who told me about this (I think he worked on it as a matter of fact) said there was concern in management that that kind of performance would just cannibalize the sales of the 400 series so the program was never pursued seriously. Throughout my time at Tek I would hear variations of this kind of story as a reason promising ideas were stopped. That is, some new idea would hurt sales of existing products, so was stopped. Of course, now that I'm middle aged, I wish I would have paid better attention to all this in the first place. Fortunately, there is this news group now! Ignore me if this was discussed previous to my joining. Hope I'm not being a bore here... Don Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: TekScopes-unsubscribe@... Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. |
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