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By jonah-archive 2025-11-2223:501 reply If you have the opportunity, I would strongly recommend visiting the vintageTEK Museum whose site this is on (it's just outside Portland) sometime. Many of the folks working there are retired from Tektronix themselves and the amount of (working!) equipment they have is astounding.
By LM358 2025-11-232:59 Yes! I went there on my first trip to Portland last year for work.
It was mesmerizing to look at all the beautiful equipment and meet all the cool people there. I've forgotten his name, but I spent at least one hour with an ex-Tektronix employee who started his career with tubes and ended it with writing FPGA code who told me many wonderous stories from his career. Highly recommended if you're at all into electronics!
And, almost always, working and displaying traces.
Vintage Tektronix equipment is gorgeous inside. Ceramic terminal blocks. Silver solder. All resistor color codes facing in the same direction.
By analog31 2025-11-2222:01 And a tiny spool of silver solder inside each unit, so you don't use the wrong solder for repairs.
By stmw 2025-11-2223:29 Agree with all of the comments there - Tektronix gear were great examples of American engineering and manufacruting excellence.
And Tektronix equipment is absolute delight to work on. And I defy anyone to find better handbooks and maintenance manuals anywhere, they're absolutely marvelous. They should be held up as the quintessential examples.
I look at the shit tech manuals around these days (that's if they exixt at all) and can't help but feel how much tech companies have screwed users in recent decades.
By adrian_b 2025-11-238:11 The Hewlett-Packard maintenance manuals of the same era were equally good, if not better, and they covered more diverse kinds of equipment.
I have learned more electronics from the Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix maintenance manuals from before 1990 than from most university courses.
By HansHamster 2025-11-231:02 Meanwhile, the DPO4054 I use at work has issues with half of the buttons, the data returned by some commands doesn't match the manual, and the probes from some newer scopes don't fit even though they all just use BNC? Maybe the software on it is just outdated? Nope, the only version you can get from the Tektronix page is older than what is on the scope. And there are newer versions, but they are only for the DPO4054B and not the older DPO4054...
By drweevil 2025-11-232:58 I'll second this. I was a 35H in the Army and fixed and calibrated many of these units. Great manuals.
By chaostheory 2025-11-230:151 reply Tbf cost has gone down dramatically for more functionality and features
By adrian_b 2025-11-238:18 Yeah, but with modern equipment you can use it only strictly for what it is intended, and frequently not even for that, due to various bugs.
With ancient equipment, like the measurement instruments from Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard, due to having excellent maintenance manuals that allowed a perfect understanding of their internals, it was often possible to find ways to use them for things that had never been foreseen by their designers.
I prefer that very much to the modern instruments that may have a lot of additional features that I do not need, while the features that I do need may have annoying limitations that cannot be surpassed.
By gaze 2025-11-2222:14 I have a 556 and 547 that I still use. They work fine. They slowed down a bit from the resistors drifting but whatever. Still very fun to use and they heat the workspace in the winter.
I hate the TDS2024 (early-2000s digital scope) with a passion. The LCD is awful, the power supply breaks all the time, and the sample memory is laughable compared to modern scopes, making it very difficult to use. Tektronix kept selling this thing (and similarly awful other ones) until not so long ago for an absurd price (~2000$). For some reason universities kept buying them instead of vastly superior ones from other companies. So now this piece of garbage is a absolutely everywhere.
By inferiorhuman 2025-11-2310:301 reply I've been eyeing used bench multimeters recently and recently came across a discussion of Agilent vs Tektronix scopes. A comment on EEVBlog posits that the TDS still has value because the cost to upgrade to probes compatible with newer Tek scopes. I've no idea if that's even remotely true but it sounds plausible.
Likewise if a military (especially the US) standardized on an older Tektronix scope that might be enough to keep production alive (much like the Boeing 767 or Fluke 77). A high retail price would suggest that Tektronix simply doesn't care about retail sales.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/buying-scope-agilent...
By fsh 2025-11-2311:07 It's easy to overlook the sample memory spec. These old Teks have decent bandwidth and 1 GS/s, but only a few thousand points of memory. This makes it impossible to zoom into a captured trace and leads to severe aliasing (trap for young players). In comparison, modern designs store millions to billions of points and can operate at high sample rates even on a slow timebase.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2220:353 reply It's very "movie-friendly."
HP stuff is too beige/bland. Tektronix stuff is more colorful.
Some of the Japanese brands were even more colorful, but we always used either Tektronix, or HP, where I worked (I used to write GPIB controller programs for them).
By stmw 2025-11-2223:37 Some of the Tektronix CRT scopes had unique phosphor colors or compositions, so it adds a lot of extra cinematic flare. https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Phosphor
By bombcar 2025-11-2221:46 It also is just the right era to fit a hugely wide range of periods - you can get away with them into the 20s or 30s if you're doing a bit of retro futurism, and they're not out of place even today.
By chemotaxis 2025-11-2223:04 There are just two photos in the entire gallery of 150+ that show modern scopes. The rest is vintage CRT equipment, going back to black-and-white films.
