And if you don't follow Dave Jones EEVblog, have a look at the first video at:
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or
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and check out the comments on utube
Dave dropped by Apex Electronics in Sun Valley just outside LA, the biggest and oldest surplus electronics store in California (and probably the US?) . Come on a tour through the Aladdin cave of surplus electronics and hardware. It?s actually pretty sad to see all this old technology just lying on the scrap heap :-(
Cheers Don...
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I noticed some of the techtronix stuff is their plug ins from their modular design era of the 1980's.
I say this in order to rant about modular design. We use lots of techtronixs stuff that predates the modular design crap that tecktronix made, and all the modular design crap that techtronix made sits in a corner of the lab having been off for decades now.
Modular design seems like such a great idea to the "ideas" people, but it generally turns out as crap. I worked with a guy who worked for General radio back in the 70's. He said that they went on a modular design effort and it pretty much kiled the company. Anyhow, I have not seen any modular design stuff since the techtronix episode.
I interviewed for a job at Tek when I was finishing grad school in 1987. I loved Tek gear, and was recruited pretty hard by a Tek guy by the name of Jeff Goll, who was spending that year at Stanford. He and his group were trying to use the Pockels electro-optic effect to make ADCs--you make 6 or 8 integrated-optic Mach-Zehnder interferometers in some usefully electrooptic material like LiNbO3, with path differences scaled as powers of 2, and apply the vertical amplifier output voltage across them. Because the Pockels effect is linear, the LSB goes through
64 or 256 periods per period of the MSB, so in principle you can make fast ADCs. The big problem was that they couldn't make the transitions line up well enough to do more than a 6-bit ADC, and the powers-that-be said it had to be at least 8 bits. (A pity you can't make the Pockels effect work in Gray code.) That ADC could have run well over 1 Gs/s, which would have been pretty amazing in 1987.
I didn't take the job, mainly because (a) the full-time pay was less than I could get as a postdoc at IBM, and (b) they were poorly equipped but thought they were well equipped. (They had a lot of those modular things themselves.) If they'd been more competitive $-wise I might have gone to work for them--my family was from Vancouver, and Beaverton is a lot closer than NYC.
IME the biggest problem with the Tek modular stuff was that the modules died if you hot-plugged them. At one point, I had one of their briefcase-style modular enclosures, with a small scope, function generator, power supply, low noise amp, and pulser. It sat on my bench for some years, and got a reasonable amount of use. I made my own low noise amp plugin using one of their prototype modules--that one would survive hot plugging!
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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I spent a lot of time at Apex when I was a kid. Not too far from Apex, in Chatsworth, was another place called Bernie's Surplus. In Pasadena, C+H Surplus had some very strange optical stuff. Those were good times.
Bob
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The modular approach made a certain amount of sense in that, back then, the cost of the power supply, the backplane, etc. were a pretty significant chunk of the overall widget's price.
Granted, in the case of Tektronix, the prices were so high anyway that some of that benefit never really made it to the end user... :-)
Not being hot-pluggable, as Phil mentioned, was also a mistake IMO.
APEX was always good for the net mass of the industrial surplus. I don't think the guy walking through in the video was old enough to really appreciate what he was seeing (he recognized the newest stuff but passed over, without mention, some more truly interesting items).
IMHO, C&H Surplus in Pasadena (now Duarte) was/is much better for the "cream of the crop" especially in terms of mechanics/pneumatics/optics and working lab and test equipment. (Albeit working test equipment was never cheap compared to the broken test equipment!)
APEX was always good for the net mass of the industrial surplus. I don't think the guy walking through in the video was old enough to really appreciate what he was seeing (he recognized the newest stuff but passed over, without mention, some more truly interesting items).
IMHO, C&H Surplus in Pasadena (now Duarte) was/is much better for the "cream of the crop" especially in terms of mechanics/pneumatics/optics and working lab and test equipment. (Albeit working test equipment was never cheap compared to the broken test equipment!)
I'm surprised about that. 7K series was supposed to be hot- switchable. 5K series and TM500 was definitely not (most of the time it was, but the mechanical alignment wasn't as good). I worked in 7K design at one time, and people there routinely hot- swapped plugins.
Of course, I've fried the power-supply tantalums just turning on the power switch!
Thats my kind of store! I'd have probably come away with more useless old junk than I could fit into my baggage allowance.
I went to the MIT swap meet in Cambridge Mass last July, but it was disappointing. Some interesting stuff but it was largely a trash and treasure market (with the accent on the trash) for ageing hippies.
Overall the southern california surplus scene was really happening 20 years ago. Unfortunately the vast quantities of surplus at the time, were the result of the shutdown of nearly all aviation and avionics engineering/manufacturing in the area, so it was kind of bittersweet.
Through the 90's and early 2000's most community college/vocational education/academic lab programs in avionics and hands-on electronic engineering got shut down. This produced a hugely advantageous flow of test equipment etc. to the surplus market but again, a bittersweet gain.
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