15 Aug
2020
15 Aug
'20
2:33 a.m.
On Aug 14, 2020, at 10:39, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
...Was actually really
nice to have a pretty bug-free system available. But, in the tried and true
bad management style that was Tektronix, nobody every asked whether there was
any customer value proposition.
Some years ago, I asked a engineer friend about the ceramic terminal strips
(and accompanying spool of silver solder) that I had seen in Tektronix scopes.
He responded by asking me what a terminal strip was supposed to do.
Erm, make connections and provide physical stability between some wires while
keeping all the connections insulated from each other? He said "yup",
that's
what these strips do. In particular, they aren't capacitors, resistors, or
inductors to any significant degree...
On a vaguely related note, I found it amusing that there was a well known hack
for Cray's (or perhaps 6600's) which were misbehaving: put a Tektronix scope
probe on a test point that generally had one there during final system checkout.
The load (extremely mnimal by design) was just enough to stabilize the system.
-r