Anyhoo - the 1821A timebase in my scope includes a resettable Single shot mode. As the crt display is not a storage type, I've often wondered if the Single shot trigger was useful for non storage scopes - perhaps using a mounted camera to get a clean waveform image? Or was this feature only applicable to storage scopes? Because otherwise, the Signle shot is about useless as the waveform is gone as soon as it's displayed on the crt.
With skill and imagination, single shot on a non-storage scope can still be useful. It is easier with a (Polaroid film) camera, but possible without. For example, I simply looked at the trace when calibrating a 1953 mechanical camera's shutter speed.
You need to have set it up so that the interesting part of the trace will be on the screen. That requires thinking and understanding what will happen, with a little experimentation.
You need to understand what small piece of information you want to measure, because you won't be able to remember every feature of the trace. For my example, it was where the second transition occurred on the screen (the first was used as the trigger).
You need to have a bright enough trace to be visible, which is a combination of the beam current (i.e. brightness), sweep speed, external illumination, phosphor persistence and retina persistence.
But overall, the
only USP of early digitising scopes (1980-2000) was their ability to capture single shot events. And even then common digitising scopes had noticeable disadvantages until after, say, 2010.