[volt-nuts] "*WAY* too expensive for even Keysight to redesign"
Poul-Henning Kamp
phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sun May 3 03:27:33 EDT 2015
--------
In message <CAFoWNwCWaz3F931THBhX+E2OTVT+HBPQ3RxTd+GOmm9uibsKNw at mail.gmail.com>
, Jan Fredriksson writes:
>> Could you say a bit more about this? Did the 3458A not make
>>economic sense for HP at the time? Is nobody buying 8.5s these days?
It's an interesting historical confluence: 8.5's are the clippers of DVMs.
8.5 only makes sense two places: fundamental/high-end metrology
and basic research.
Everybody else are totally fine with 7.5 and very few actually need
more than 6.5 (specifying the temperature of your aligator-clips
gets old really fast.)
The 3458A made it possible to validate the josephson junction as
SI voltage reference -- which ironically made the 3458A surplus to
metrology requirements: Now you can generate any voltage you want
on demand.
That leaves a theoretical market in basic research, but that's a
very small market which will happily pay a phd-theses for a prototype,
but unless its on CERN scale, production runs are never an option.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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