Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

SOS: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tektronix-222PS-Oscilloscope-New-Batteries-Calibrated-Case-Excellent/324127770720

Clearly this should be purchased by med immediately and rescued from, I mean, wtf? Someone thinks its a Fluke or something?!?
 

Tempting but it looks like Saskia already has her eye on it so I'll let it go.

No, go ahead. Shipping, customs, etc will be a huge pain. If you want to bid on it, go ahead.

[med6753]

It didn't take long to figure out what was wrong with the 3rd P6000 probe. The center connection between item 1 and item 5 is burnt open. Gorillas at work. 

So I'll see if I can make it a X1 probe.

[med6753]

SOS: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tektronix-222PS-Oscilloscope-New-Batteries-Calibrated-Case-Excellent/324127770720

Clearly this should be purchased by med immediately and rescued from, I mean, wtf? Someone thinks its a Fluke or something?!?
 

Tempting but it looks like Saskia already has her eye on it so I'll let it go.

No, go ahead. Shipping, customs, etc will be a huge pain. If you want to bid on it, go ahead.

OK. It's very tempting but I got other priorities at the moment but that could change in a flash. 

[BU508A]

Previously in the TEA forum: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2995954/#msg2995954

This time I'm presenting you the Keithley 155 Nulldetector Microvoltmeter.

Front and back side:


Battery check is looking good for the positive and the negative rail:


Looking at the main pcb, not very much to see. There isn't even an op-amp around:


And here again, same as with the Fluke 750A, some broken plastic spacers of the main switch:


Very nice looking input binding posts. I assume, the metal is CuTe:


Battery storage. The batteries itself are a little bit outdated. Replacement ordered.


And here is a little test with the DMM check plus from Mr. Malone at 5V:


Thank you for watching.

Here is the link to the manual:
https://www.tek.com/manual/keithley-model-155-null-detector-microvoltmeter-instruction-manual-29031d

[Carl_Smith]

Look again; it's worse: EDLIN. 

mnem

Oohh.. EDLIN.  I used it extensively on my first computer, a 4.77 MHz Compaq Portable.  DOS version 2.something.  I decided to google "EDLIN" to see if anyone on the net these days even remembers it's existance and I was suprised to find that Wikipedia says:

Although superseded in MS-DOS 5.0 and later by the full-screen MS-DOS Editor, and by Notepad in Microsoft Windows, it continues to be included in the 32-bit versions of current Microsoft operating systems.

Really? It's still in Windows?  Problem is that I don't have anything that runs 32 bit Windows.   

[Saskia]

anything more comfy than vi, ed or sed is overrated and pure luxury.

[bd139]

Yes I am a vi proponent as well. In fact I wrote a vi clone when I was at university. It got lost in the noise of the other thousand clones at the time. I invented a whole new editing buffer system that used memory mapped files with virtualised piece tables (before it was called that) over them. You could open a 1Gb text file on a 32mb sun box and edit it!

[BU508A]

+1 for vi 

emacs: *blerk*

 

[mansaxel]

You ended up paying way more than I was prepared to pay for that lot, even though it's quite a haul. I was amazed at your fast fingers when you got outbid in the closing second there!

Great lot title though: "Things"

 

Yes. I was impressed with myself too. I did not think I'd make it. And I paid more than I originally intended. But, the haul looks promising, indeed. Proof, pudding, etc. I'll gloat properly if and when it turns out well. 

(You wouldn't have recognised me in the list of bidders though. I'm "mpj001" there.)

Now I do...

[med6753]

My other probe rack is full so these guys mounted in another location but readily accessible.

[mnementh]

Look again; it's worse: EDLIN. 

mnem

Oohh.. EDLIN.  I used it extensively on my first computer, a 4.77 MHz Compaq Portable.  DOS version 2.something.  I decided to google "EDLIN" to see if anyone on the net these days even remembers it's existance and I was suprised to find that Wikipedia says:

Although superseded in MS-DOS 5.0 and later by the full-screen MS-DOS Editor, and by Notepad in Microsoft Windows, it continues to be included in the 32-bit versions of current Microsoft operating systems.

Really? It's still in Windows?  Problem is that I don't have anything that runs 32 bit Windows.   

I know.  It was Saskia's horror story of trying to run XP in a VM on a modern machine which made me think of that.

Imagine having to write FOR a modern machine while using the equivalent of THIS:   

bd, how 'bout THAT for "a old ThinkPad"...? 

mnem
There's a special level of Hell reserved just for me. 

[Saskia]

now I am thinkin of running DOS on a VM on a Xeon.

Anyway, I have a TP600 here which is still operational.

[mansaxel]

anything more comfy than vi, ed or sed is overrated and pure luxury.

EDITOR WARS! YES!!!

I mostly edit files in vi or ed, depending on terminal. But, I'm an infidel with an Aquamacs buffer open, especially for editing LaTeX source. The Aarhus university macro package for LaTeX is so good I'm prepared to cheat.

I used to edit the zone file for .SE in FreeBSD nvi. That was painful, and my colleague who was using emacs for same had a considerably easier time, at least opening the file. But, DNS zone files, being line oriented, are much easier with the line paradigm in vi than the region junk in emacs. In the end, we removed the editor step and poked at entries in a database instead, using a Perl program called "chk2000.pl", because it evolved from a very, very ugly shell script called "chk" that I'd written, to check whether name servers were answering properly before delegating.

I'm also, in the spirit of pipelines and jaw-dropping oneliners, quite fond of the in-place editing functions invoked with "sed -i -e" and its Perl equivalent. That's one of the very few places I'm allowing myself a spoon of the GNU syntactical sugar. For most other functions, my finger macros are tuned to 1990s "nvi" or similar.

Finally, I think we all should join in condemning the perversity that is "nano". It's the first thing I'm replacing with "ed" and "nvi" (not "vim", mind you) when I get my hands on a Linux system. The BSD computers, as usual, come with the right set of tools from the start, of course.

Postscript: We should not forget "awk". The things you can do in it. 'mazing. No less.

[Saskia]

the nastiest thing I did was to use sed and awk in makefiles to define targets on the fly (i.e. during execution) depending on variables and runtime results.
This was in 1998 ... The only thing I liked more was the editor ...what was its name ...kdb ...

[mansaxel]

now I am thinkin of running DOS on a VM on a Xeon.

Anyway, I have a TP600 here which is still operational.

I've got a 1999 vintage Thinkpad 380Z with FreeDOS and OpenBSD. I'm trying to get a Niros / Ericsson radio programming tool to work. So far, no luck. I keep thinking I should swap FreeDOS for real MS-DOS 6.22 and try a bit harder.

Also, I should get something a bit more modern to run 10 on. A Toughbook, preferably.

[mansaxel]

the nastiest thing I did was to use sed and awk in makefiles to define targets on the fly (i.e. during execution) depending on variables and runtime results.
This was in 1998 ... The only thing I liked more was the editor ...what was its name ...kdb ...

I -- without having seen the code, keep thinking it probably was better than GNU Autoconf. That it was faster goes without saying.

[bd139]

Got to love awk. I've got a 500 line piece of shit I wrote in a day nearly 10 years ago still in production at the moment. The brains were awk tied together with named pipes, socat, openssh and psql. This was a hack job that was MacGuyver'ed up because the traditional "patterns team" (GOF / Enterprise Integrations Patterns lot) had managed to fuck up the project for 3 months solid and missed delivery. Two attempts have been made to replace it but failed so far  . All it does is suck up some valuations off a remote sftp box once a day, parse them, do some aggregate calculations and stick them in a postgres database  . socat is used to push a notification to the rest of the system to do it's shit once the data is there. Paid a consultant a fuck load of money for the last AWS attempt and he produced some rube goldberg machine in AWS Lambda and SQS and stormed off after getting all pissy that he couldn't get it to run reliably. My jobby even has ansible scripts to push it out to an EC2 instance now....

[bd139]

the nastiest thing I did was to use sed and awk in makefiles to define targets on the fly (i.e. during execution) depending on variables and runtime results.
This was in 1998 ... The only thing I liked more was the editor ...what was its name ...kdb ...

I -- without having seen the code, keep thinking it probably was better than GNU Autoconf. That it was faster goes without saying.

Anything GNU like that is a ball ache. Much prefer BSD userland and tooling full stop which is slowly working on eliminating turdy GNU shit. FreeBSD is about right. LLVM, ZFS, tools with decent manpages, no GNU info in sight, no autoconf. I'd mess my pants with excitement if I could get someone to hire me to use it. Unfortunately it's all Linux nobbling.

Edit: I must say I am slightly motivated by being disgruntled. May go and throw up a FreeBSD VM now 

[med6753]

I am surrounded by belly aching and bitching and moaning software engineers.  I think I'll go watch TV. 

[tggzzz]

anything more comfy than vi, ed or sed is overrated and pure luxury.

Pah! Luxury.
 
Try using 5 channel paper tape running through teleprinters at 5cps.

You think before you start editing

[Neomys Sapiens]

anything more comfy than vi, ed or sed is overrated and pure luxury.

Back when a PC was a PC and ran DOS, Norton Editor ruled. Unfortunately, that was NOT the world I was living in. As I was associated with the Siemens structure, we ran CPM86 and Concurrent CPM86 until a time when our so-called PG (Programmiergeraet) was already a Pentium with VGA display. You had - at least in the Siemens distribution - the choice between ED (a wicked crutch of a line editor) and Wordstar, whose command codes did haunt me well into DOS times.
After the Simatic environment got transferred to DOS, it became better.
For a time I liked a thing called CryptEdit, which could - guess what -. also encrypt files. I used it until the first inadvertent activation of this capability. It got unliked and PURGED.

Nowadays I'm content with VEdit, UltraEdit, Notepad++, because one of them is what I mostly find in place, with Notepad++ becoming more and more widely used.

Integrated hex editor, regex search and replace, large file and network support are useful things, as is an easy interface towards colour marking and highlighting outside of language support. Imagine checking and processing log files, simulation data etc.

[bd139]

I am surrounded by belly aching and bitching and moaning software engineers.  I think I'll go watch TV. 

  apologies. Unfortunately our jobs lead to mental illness 

[Neomys Sapiens]

My other probe rack is full so these guys mounted in another location but readily accessible.

Dang about the lost No.4. But you'll get one.

[Neomys Sapiens]

the nastiest thing I did was to use sed and awk in makefiles to define targets on the fly (i.e. during execution) depending on variables and runtime results.
This was in 1998 ... The only thing I liked more was the editor ...what was its name ...kdb ...

This is about as evil as APL.

[mansaxel]

FreeBSD is about right. LLVM, ZFS, tools with decent manpages, no GNU info in sight, no autoconf. I'd mess my pants with excitement if I could get someone to hire me to use it. Unfortunately it's all Linux nobbling.

Edit: I must say I am slightly motivated by being disgruntled. May go and throw up a FreeBSD VM now 

You do know that phk is a member of this forum and posts regularly?