[volt-nuts] Keithley - and Tek gear

Dick Moore richiem at hughes.net
Wed Nov 17 19:50:31 UTC 2010


On Nov 17, 2010, at 4:00 AM, volt-nuts-request at febo.com wrote:

> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:20:15 -0600
> From: John Lofgren <jlofgren at lsr.com>
> Subject: Re: [volt-nuts] Keithley 2001 - and Tek gear
> To: Discussion of precise voltage measurement <volt-nuts at febo.com>
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> 	<B1D0388E59D629408AB9FD22E3887B3B5B3C616367 at Exchange.lsr.local>
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> 
> Not to hijack a thread or get off topic, but that's why we love the older Tek gear.  Their documentation was first rate.  That voluminous and detailed documentation did come back to bite them, though.
> 
> I read story in " Winning with people: The first 40 years of Tektronix" about the Tek people discovering counterfeit scopes that the military (Navy?) was having built.  As part of their contract to supply scopes they had to supply documentation that amounted to a detailed build manual for the product.  Once the military customer had the documentation they shopped it around to contract manufacturers and found somebody who would build the scopes to print for, presumably, a lower price than the genuine Tek unit.
> 
> Looks like there is such a thing as too much information :)
> 
> 
> -John

It was a little more complicated -- When I started at Tek in 1961, I was told that in the 50's, during the Korean conflict, Tek had military contracts that stipulated that Tek had to allow other firms to build the mil-spec gear as a matter of national security. Lavoie Labs and Dumont built Tek scopes under these contracts, and then continued to build Tek scope clones for years afterward, on into the 60's, most notably, clones of the 530 and 540 series, which had mil contract provisions on them. Tek of course had the ceramic terminal strips and the others didn't -- Tek made those ceramic strips themselves. 

Once PCBs became the basis of wiring, the ceramics plant was falling into disuse, so Tek decided to make ceramic CRT jugs. The problems that needed to be solved in getting the glass faceplates and the ceramic jugs to hold hard vacuum were immense. The fact that they did it is pretty amazing. Corning wasn't real pleased about the switch away from glass jugs. Anyway, doing business with the gummint can be profitable but a bit dangerous.




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