I've been watching some episodes of the outstanding US science-fiction TV
series "The Outer Limits", which aired from 1963-1965 (two seasons). The
settings of many episodes prominently feature electronic equipment,
typically in a scientific laboratory, military command post, space mission
control center, or a spacecraft.
Despite the fact that the show's opening title sequence begins with what is
probably best-known oscilloscope trace in history
(), I haven't seen a lot of
scopes in the episodes themselves, and the few that have appeared weren't
operating. A DuMont shows up from time to time, just sitting on a counter
or console as an afterthought. You'd think they'd at least be rigged up to
display the ever-popular Lissajous figures, but the series was pretty
low-budget.
One episode showed, in the background, a cart-mounted scope which had the
general form and panel layout of a Tek 500 series, but with a sort of white
cowling around the top and sides of the front panel. In another, there was
a rack-mounted 5-inch scope with a dark gray/green panel. I don't know what
brand either scope was.
In general, the electronics were a mix of real contemporary equipment and
stuff that was probably purpose-built as props. The real equipment
sometimes included those big multi-track analog tape recorders and vertical
pen plotters that were so popular in the early years of aerospace
development. The "prop" equipment was generally panels of meters, toggle
switches, pots/rotary switches and indicator lights; the meters and lights
were usually non-operational unless they had some significance in the plot.
A lot of them were in 19-inch racks or bench-type consoles.
A striking feature of these "prop" panels was the lack of labeling on any of
the devices unless, again, a particular device had a role in the story (e.g.
the radiation meter on an out-of-control reactor). But then, I guess a
scientist who's smart enough to invent a time machine or inter-dimensional
portal should be able to remember what switch does what.
Another electronics tidbit from the series: in one episode, a scientist had
developed a way to rapidly advance an individual primate's (including
human's) evolution, based on the premise that an organism's future form is
already encoded in its DNA and can brought out by the use of a machine built
for that task. To show a visitor how effective this technique was, the
scientist pointed to one of his successes - a chimpanzee seated at a bench
in a corner of the lab, quite convincingly using a VOM to troubleshoot some
piece of vacuum-tube electronics!
Albert
