[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


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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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