Historic Tektronix videos back online--neat stuff for test equipment geeks!

[N2IXK]

After being offline for over a year, the folks at VintageTEK appear to have fixed their hosting problems, and put their Video Gallery back up.

Lots of great stuff here, especially for restorers/collectors of vintage Tektronix gear.  Internal training films, corporate promotional films, etc.

http://www.vintagetek.org/video-gallery/

I downloaded copies of many of these in case they go offline again...

[free_electron]

this is a really cool one and should be required to watch by anone that wants to make a circuit board

http://www.vintagetek.org/tektronix-printed-circuit-boards-1969/

[SeanB]

Anybody want to buy the Fluke 8000 they have for sale, not working?

[Orpheus]

this is a really cool one and should be required to watch by anone that wants to make a circuit board

http://www.vintagetek.org/tektronix-printed-circuit-boards-1969/

Wow, I was very impressed by that. I used to manually layout and etch my own PCBs as a teenage hobbyist in the 70s (still do, sometimes), and I think of *those* whenever I see low-density manual vintage PCBs (especially without silkscreen) but this video really drove home the difference between my homebrews and commercial boards, despite the superficial similarity.

I'll say this for those low density techniques, though: when I stumble across one of my old projects, 30+ years later, I expect it to still work, and it almost always does, more or less.

[warp_foo]

For the PCB video: The music... seriously. I wonder how many musicians died making that music.

[mariush]

I've put all the non-youtube videos here if anyone wants to download and save them:

Code: [Select]

--ftp://www.helpedia.com/pub/mirrors/www.vintagetek.org/video-gallery/

remove the two -- in front, stupid forum script adds the url tags within the code tag so had to put them to prevent that....
use any ftp client, or directly from browser etc etc

[sync]

this is a really cool one and should be required to watch by anone that wants to make a circuit board

http://www.vintagetek.org/tektronix-printed-circuit-boards-1969/

Very interesting. Thanks.

Is that manufacturing process the reason for the gold plated PCBs in some old HP gear?

[free_electron]

That process was the original double sided board process. So yes, that is the reason you find these gold boards in so many really old machines.
That is also the reason doublesided was not done for consumer. It was too expensive.

When they switched from gold to tin (and fecl to sodiumpersulfate as etchant) and  the cost collapsed. They also stopped doing selective plating removing the need for ink printed silkscreens and went the photographic way allowing much thinner structures. So density bloomed and the cost collapsed.

The tin/sodiumpersulfate process is still in use today.

[MetraCollector]

They use alkaline etching process which was new for me 2 years ago.

[van-c]

What a treasure!  Thanks N2IXK for bringing this up front.  A definite bookmark for me.

One of my favorites is Building A Ceramic CRT (1967).  Not only is the ceramic CRT fabrication process interesting and informative, that nostalgic (though somewhat too loud) '60s jazz background music adds a touch of intrigue; it is actually synchronized with sequences in the film.

--Van