Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[srb1954]

I thought you won one of the 180 series SA mainframes, in the last PP auction, it should work in the SA mainframe, just some of the later ones haven't got the scope cal outputs, as they were made long after the scope modules became obsolete.
I'm I the only one on here with some 180 scopes in my collection?

David

I've got a couple of 181 storage mainframes and a selection of plug-ins. Unfortunately both mainframes are dead and have been languishing at the end of the repair queue for more than 5 years.

[tautech]

I am tired and soon going to bed, so I will leave it at that.

Not so fast..... 
You mentioned punch cards but not what came along soon after them, yes floppies and for us consumers 5 1/4' jobbies not them newfangled hard 3 1/4" things that aren't floppy at all ! 
Got a stack of both in the cupboard that should all be chucked out and come to think of it we do have a big bonfire to light soon.
The grandboy was here the other day and smart little poo he is too but no idea about things rural ....scared of mud, cow poo and dogs FFS but wanted to know about floppies FFS .....what on earth is his mutha teaching him ?
So poppa pulled one outta the cupboard and disemboweled it with him for which he seemed very grateful and packed it away to take home to show his farter.

USB sticks, well I'm nearly over them too and onto MicroSD cards in USB adapters or these new fangled USBC drives, tiny little fuckers holding half a terabyte !

[srb1954]

In fact I didn’t even use floppy disks back in the 90s. Had moved to Zip disks and CDRs.

Floppies are absolutely marvelous, I much prefer them to punch cards, sorry 

I think you can make a pretty good argument for punchcards having an edge to the floppy in reliability.  Mostly, I suspect, because no-one ever built punches, readers or reader/punches to a price; they were built to spec. 

Floppies, not so much.

One could make a better more reliable floppy drive, potentially. Not the floppies' fault...

No, I still maintain floppies are much better.


How large and heavy would be a 1.4MB worth of punch cards ?
I bet it doesn't fit in your shirt pocket like a floppy would 

And, once you have typed this metric ton of punch cards that amount to 1.4MB... run it through the computer and then it tells you sorry you made a mistake / typo, do it all over again... you are happy.

Floppy you can just correct your mistake in seconds.

How long does it take to punch holes for this 1.4MB worth of punch cards, versus a floppy drive ?

Yes, much longer... so long it's unpractical.

Sorry, floppy wins by several orders of magnitude. 

Also floppies generally don't get all their bits thrown into random disorder when you accidentally drop them on the floor.

I shudder to think how long it would take to reorganise 1.4MB worth of punch cards if you dropped them.

[tautech]

The LeSiglent T3DSO2102 is my big Father's Day present from wife and dad

IIRC it's a SDS2102X with inbuilt 25 MHz AWG and 140 Mpts mem depth. You should be able to improve it to 300 MHz however it probably comes with 100 MHz switchable probes although it has autosense which IIRC will detect 10x and 100x probes.
I had the 300 MHz 4ch model for a few years and have a pile of FW versions for these although you might need some tv84 CFG magic to convert it back to a Siglent.

[Specmaster]

Yeah quite frankly fuck floppy disks. They were shit when they came out. Corruption, speed problems, reliability problems, tiny storage. Add 30 years to the problem and now you have mechanical and magnetic degradation to contend with.

Note I’m so high tech I had to go round someone’s house the other day and borrow their PC to put a CD-ROM contents on a USB stick. I don’t even have a CD drive now.

In fact I didn’t even use floppy disks back in the 90s. Had moved to Zip disks and CDRs.

I also moved over to zip discs, but sadly I also discovered that they also were far from being perfect, had a few mishaps along the way with those as well.

[mansaxel]

I also moved over to zip discs, but sadly I also discovered that they also were far from being perfect, had a few mishaps along the way with those as well.

FTP killed the ZIP drive in its only successful industry, printing. I'm not crying.

Networks are the only way I can stand -- I did reflect on the fact that it is only at boot I use removable media these days. And a recent batch of servers, ICBA to do that, so I used the "Mount and boot from an ISO file through the remote management card" feature. Over Wifi. Because ICBA to connect my laptop up. It worked. Less hassle. And all the saved hassle meant that I could do two machines in parallel, from one ISO, without dd'ing to sticks or finding a burner. Win.

[tautech]

The LeSiglent T3DSO2102 is my big Father's Day present from wife and dad

IIRC it's a SDS2102X with inbuilt 25 MHz AWG and 140 Mpts mem depth. You should be able to improve it to 300 MHz however it probably comes with 100 MHz switchable probes although it has autosense which IIRC will detect 10x and 100x probes.
I had the 300 MHz 4ch model for a few years and have a pile of FW versions for these although you might need some tv84 CFG magic to convert it back to a Siglent.

Oh and mnem, keep your eyes open for the SPL2016 16ch digital probe set but not just in Siglent colors as these also are used by LeCroy, Tek and Rigol and there's also the DIY thread to make a set:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/diy-logic-analyzer-probe-and-pods-for-siglent-scopes/
However the OEM sets with the nice 10 way silicon ribbon coax is far superior to anything you can cobble up at home however Defpom did a reasonable job converting a set he got off ePay to fit his SDS2104X Plus.

[Kosmic]

TinkerDwagon SQUEEEEE!!!! 



I hopped on fleaBay to see if my 54621D had shipped yet... and my dashboard thwapped me upside the head with this alert!!!

w00t!

mnem
*toddles off to stalk the wily UPS driver*

Nice, was a good deal 

Mine was apparently shipped today. But I don't see a tracking number so it's a little bit suspect.

[vk6zgo]

Yeah quite frankly fuck floppy disks. They were shit when they came out. Corruption, speed problems, reliability problems, tiny storage.

Ever use a Commodore 64 with its datacassette?
Cassette storage put me off computers for more than a decade,---floppys were wonderful in comparison!

Add 30 years to the problem and now you have mechanical and magnetic degradation to contend with.

Note I’m so high tech I had to go round someone’s house the other day and borrow their PC to put a CD-ROM contents on a USB stick. I don’t even have a CD drive now.

That's another thing that gripes me about my new laptop, though in mitigation, they put proper hinges on the thing, & I open it up much more often than I ever need to look at the contents of CD ROM.

I would still have both my previous laptops, if not for the hinges breaking, & my "bodge" repairs not working for long.

OK, I could salvage the CD drive from one of the dead ones, & buy a box for it, complete with all the necessary connectors, or buy a complete USB connected external CD drive, but the last time I needed to download a CD's contents, I just chucked the thing in the old W7 desktop & connected to it by WIFI, to transfer the data to my laptop.

W10 & W7 don't talk together easily (for me), & it wouldn't let me access the CD drive, so I had to download it into a file on the desktop before I could get access to it from the laptop.
Slow, but it got done, without the intermediate thumbdrive stage.

In fact I didn’t even use floppy disks back in the 90s. Had moved to Zip disks and CDRs.

I found a USB connected floppy drive that I had forgotten I had, a few weeks back, & wonder of wonder, even found a floppy the other day.
I must try it, just to see if it freaks the laptop out!

[Cerebus]

Yeah quite frankly fuck floppy disks. They were shit when they came out. Corruption, speed problems, reliability problems, tiny storage. Add 30 years to the problem and now you have mechanical and magnetic degradation to contend with.

Note I’m so high tech I had to go round someone’s house the other day and borrow their PC to put a CD-ROM contents on a USB stick. I don’t even have a CD drive now.

In fact I didn’t even use floppy disks back in the 90s. Had moved to Zip disks and CDRs.

Floppies are absolutely marvelous, I much prefer them to punch cards, sorry 

It's really difficult to write a shopping list or a quick schematic on the back of a floppy disk. 

[mnementh]

TinkerDwagon SQUEEEEE!!!!     

I hopped on fleaBay to see if my 54621D had shipped yet... and my dashboard thwapped me upside the head with this alert!!!  w00t!

mnem
*toddles off to stalk the wily UPS driver*

Nice, was a good deal  Mine was apparently shipped today. But I don't see a tracking number so it's a little bit suspect.

Mine did not show shipped yesterday. Today it showed out for delivery. But look at the bottom of the tracking detail:



It's here, BTW... but I just got in from literally moving half the garage and sucking dirt to make room to work inside and get the space ready for varnishing the Anniversary Project table. I ache all over; I am exhausted, and... sticky. I will clean up a bit and change clothes before playing around with my new toy... especially as the outer carton is wadded up on one corner about a inch...

I definitely want to take some photo documentation in case there's a nasty surprise.

mnem
 

[vk6zgo]

Free. Just pay for shipping.

I do rather like 180 series HP Oscilloscopes, but I don't have a mainframe.
We used the mainframes at one of my old jobs as hosts for the spectrum analyser plugin----the whole assembly was a LOT lighter than a 141!
I think, that for four or five mainframes, we had one set of normal 'scope plugins sitting in the TE store.
I did use one as a normal 'scope on one occasion, whilst one of the Tek 465 series things was out of service.

[Cerebus]

The grandboy was here the other day and smart little poo he is too but no idea about things rural ....scared of mud, cow poo and dogs FFS

Well if you will run at him to hug him while you're covered in all three of them I don't blame him.

[Cerebus]

FTP killed the ZIP drive in its only successful industry, printing. I'm not crying.

Not before Syquest drives had already done for them.

[mnementh]

It SUCKS...

   

No, seriously; it sucks dirt. And pretty much everything else it comes in contact with; it's almost like having a little tame singularity. 

The boy wanted to play with the new toy... so I let him. Surprisingly, he actually got something useful accomplished: All along that hedge there was unswept clippings from me doing the hedge-trimmer thing; over a foot out from the hedge and easily 4 inches deep. In there is everything from paint chips where the painters scraped the house to flaked off chunks of drywall & concrete to leaves from the garage and of course, all those hedge trimmings. Thing ran for easily a hour straight, and while the cord did get warm to the touch, no funny noises or smells. 

Now time to go couch potato with the boi a little before bed... I may or may not have my first date with Ms LeSiglent tonight. 

mnem
*pops some more pills*

[mnementh]

The grandboy was here the other day and smart little poo he is too but no idea about things rural ....scared of mud, cow poo and dogs FFS

Well if you will run at him to hug him while you're covered in all three of them I don't blame him.

         BWAHAHAHAHA!

Thanks for the belly, laugh, C... I needed it after the day I've had. 

mnem
owww... even my hair hurts... 

[mnementh]

...the outer carton is wadded up on one corner about a inch... I definitely want to take some photo documentation in case there's a nasty surprise.

mnem
 

I popped it out the box for a moment while the boi was in the bathroom; it appears fully intact. Interesting is that the badging does not say LeCroy... only "Teledyne Test Tools" and the classic Teledyne 4 diamonds logo. Evidently LeCroy is distancing themselves from this product, knowing that the source is so recognizable.

A'aight... I need to go lie down before I fall over.

mnem
All y'alls keep it down to a dull roar, willya...? 

[mnementh]

In The Box: one NA 120V Power Cable, one +2 Spiked Mace, one +3 Spiked flail, and two PP510 100MHz probes.




Back of unit: Hmmm... Cal sticker.




Obligatory Cal Signal pic. I hope I can choose larger fonts for some of these measurements. Large fan is barely noticeable, but I assume it is thermally controlled. The screen is effing huge and scary Hi-Res; feels the same as going to my 1054Zed after using a TDS210 for years.

mnem
 

[tautech]

The screen is effing huge and scary Hi-Res; feels the same as going to my 1054Zed after using a TDS210 for years.

mnem
 

LOL but these are just 8", you wait until you get in front of the later 10" models with touch and mouse control.

Did you get a A4 paper Cal cert with it ?
FYI the rear case on these was used on the later X-Plus models also.

Looking forward to more of your 1st impressions..... 

[Cubdriver]

I thought you won one of the 180 series SA mainframes, in the last PP auction, it should work in the SA mainframe, just some of the later ones haven't got the scope cal outputs, as they were made long after the scope modules became obsolete.
I'm I the only one on here with some 180 scopes in my collection?

David

I have a 181 here.


Lab Cat looking none too pleased with the poor probe compensation:


-Pat

[mansaxel]

It's really difficult to write a shopping list or a quick schematic on the back of a floppy disk. 

I've been known to repurpose unused diskette labels for other marking uses. But as convenient as card stock, no.

[mansaxel]

FTP killed the ZIP drive in its only successful industry, printing. I'm not crying.

Not before Syquest drives had already done for them.

The Syquest was first and then killed by Zip here -- their market share mainly was in the 44MB drives, and they are much earlier than the Zip drives; when the Zip came, it had a brief sejour, after which FTP took over.

[BU508A]

Still have  CD driver in my computer, always will, need it to read all my old CDs and DVD, and every time I want to burn an ISO file to install a newer version of Linux.

One example of several tutorials:

And we've discussed this "how to make a bootable USB stick" thing before.
It is not the fault of the USB stick, if the OS doesn't boot from it.

USB sticks suck. My ex company gave me one when I signed up, containing some documents for me to read. Brand new key, there was a virus on it already. Tried to format it, didn't work. Tried to delete the partition, start from scratch, make a new partition, format that etc... a clean sheet. Didn't work, the partitioning utility failed to erase the existing partition, no explanation. Eventually I threw the stick in the garbage bin and that solved the problem. Low tech, but worked very well.

Never had that much problems with floppies back in the day, no more than I do with SD cards or USB sticks.

That is also nót the fault of the USB stick.
As an example: Sony had distributed a root-kit over CDs/DVDs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

[Robert763]

No, I still maintain floppies are much better.

That is because you are not comparing them to the state of the art. What people should do is to have their files on a networked drive.  Compared to a networked file system the floppy drive and its media are slow, unreliable, insecure, and have puny capacity.

(of course, if you don't mind Someone Else reading that file (and I'm not talking about GENERAL ERROR  ) you can outsource that part. Flipping the RO tab on a 3,5" diskette will take longer time than copying a 1,4MiB file over most networks built the last 20 years, so speed is not an issue. )

And yes, I'm jumping around with first comparing to punch cards, then networked file systems. Point is, that floppy drives and media are an all-time low in medium reliability, only underbid by the practice of storing files to compact cassettes as was popular on several home computers.

Well we don't all have our own servers, FTP site or whatever so when we want to transfer a small file it's either a 3rd party site or email which is not as secure as handing over physical media. With Microsoft trying to kill off CD's & DVDs if I want to transfer more than a few tens of megabytes e.g provide a manual with a bit of TE, it means buying several Gb of USB stick.  And unless they are "branded" they are no more reliable than a quality CDR.
Maybe I'm just a luddite, but I don't like the idea of relying on my data (and if MS have their way software) being on someone elses hardware.

[bd139]

No, I still maintain floppies are much better.

That is because you are not comparing them to the state of the art. What people should do is to have their files on a networked drive.  Compared to a networked file system the floppy drive and its media are slow, unreliable, insecure, and have puny capacity.

(of course, if you don't mind Someone Else reading that file (and I'm not talking about GENERAL ERROR  ) you can outsource that part. Flipping the RO tab on a 3,5" diskette will take longer time than copying a 1,4MiB file over most networks built the last 20 years, so speed is not an issue. )

And yes, I'm jumping around with first comparing to punch cards, then networked file systems. Point is, that floppy drives and media are an all-time low in medium reliability, only underbid by the practice of storing files to compact cassettes as was popular on several home computers.

Well we don't all have our own servers, FTP site or whatever so when we want to transfer a small file it's either a 3rd party site or email which is not as secure as handing over physical media. With Microsoft trying to kill off CD's & DVDs if I want to transfer more than a few tens of megabytes e.g provide a manual with a bit of TE, it means buying several Gb of USB stick.  And unless they are "branded" they are no more reliable than a quality CDR.
Maybe I'm just a luddite, but I don't like the idea of relying on my data (and if MS have their way software) being on someone elses hardware.

Yep. I've got two AWS snowballs to deal with soon. They are basically 100TB storage appliances for shipping data on. Network is not fast enough and too expensive.

As for your data being on someone else's hardware, it depends on where it is and what custodial contract is in place and how much you care versus convenience. I mirror my data onto Amazon S3 and iCloud. iCloud for convenience, S3 as backup. I also have local copy on an SSD and on laptop of course.