Hear! Hear!
Naturally I disagree: Owners of hardware should be able to get the service manuals for their purchased equipment. Some sellers want to keep the repair profits for themselves, but in my opinion this is unwise. OK, we'll leave that point. However, surely you agree that if the manufacturer made detailed service manuals available at the time of original sale, as HP did, the associated IP should be treated the same as the instruction manual, per your statement.
Which check is that?
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Thanks,
- Win
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Well, the 'unreadable' and 'missing' sound to me like that's a copying or scanning problem, not the fault of the manual itself.
Generally, when I was in the army, the manuals were broken down into 5 levels.
1 - operation (like how to drive a car) 2 - maintenance (like how to change the oil, add water to radiator, etc.) 3 - service (like tires, batteries, etc.) 4 - field repair (like fixing the starter or the brakes) 5 - depot repair (like rebuilding the engine)Those 5 "echelons" are only a rough idea of how the manuals were arranged. Some military manuals were combined, such as a "-35" manual included the 3rd thru 5th echelon - basically everything about service and repair. A "-15" manual would be all of the above.
You may have to get 2 or more military manuals to get all the info that might be in a regular equipment manual from the manufacturer.
Well, if you are in the military, I would imagine that all of that is now online and available to the authorized people.
Welcome to the Real World. Bugs eat papers, manuals and books. Acid in the paper makes it turn brittle and brown after a few decades, making it nearly useless. But these problems are not related to the topic were discussing. However the bookworms should be very concerned about the copyright restrictions because they are severely restricting their food source! ;-)
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Aw, c'mon, Rich! We all know that perfect is a straight wire with gain, with a bandwidth from DC to daylight. And we all know that even HP couldn't do that. Nice try.
The check to purchase the third edition of a "certain universally respected textbook of Electronics Engineering" mentioned above, of course.
By the way, I bought the second edition used. I'd consider it an honor to be able to cut a check for a new copy of the 3rd edition, so the authors could directly see the benefit.
In business, the best way to say "thanks for the help" is in cash. Which is kind of the point of this whole discussion, I suppose.
Thanks (of the non-monetary variety this time, I'm afraid) Chris
Have they licensed reproduction of manuals? All the ones listed seem to be the usual used manual brokers.
John
Yes, this is the classic 0 dB brickenbox amplifier.
John
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It's been too many years -- placing the manuals on reserve in the Engineering Department library is an obvious idea. A smart instrument manufacturer might also allow professors to make a copy for their personal use or to chain down in the lab, where it's most useful.
If I buy a old used car which is no longer supported by the dealer network (like a '67 Ford Mustang), I expect a set of keys from the seller, not Ford. I wouldn't buy a car without them. I feel the manuals are an integral part of the whole instrument package, and I also feel that a manual should be sold with a used/obsolete instrument if it was originally sold with that manual. Ideally, the seller of the obsolete instrument should provide that manual, and buy it if he doesn't have it.
Fact is, though, most sellers of old HP instruments don't provide the manuals. That means we've got to scrounge them up. Agilent provides a list of suggested vendors here:
I ran down the eight web links listed on the above page looking for the HP 5370B manual. ManualsPlus has it for $75.00 USD. Consolidated Surplus (which is double-linked, there are actually only seven in the list) shows available, price not listed. W.J. Ford Surplus Enterprises shows Not Available but e-mail to be sure (too bad -- they rent manuals for $10/month!). The others come up blank. Also, yesterday I made a call to another vendor I occasionally use and found that he had it, too. He wanted more than $75 for it, though.
To be honest, I think all of these arguments about how manufacturers should provide more manuals for old, orphaned instruments, or broadcast them free on the internet, would hold a lot more water if there weren't any used, legal manuals out there.
If I could be permitted an analogy. Let's look at the user manual "The Joy of Sex" by Alex Comfort. The book is not sex. You don't need the manual to engage in sex, or to experience joy in sex. The manual has no intrinsic use for sex on its own, unless you happen to want to know how to use your instrument better. However, Dr. Comfort's heirs (he passed away a few years ago, I hear) would be most unhappy to hear that, because of these admittedly true facts, you copied the manual. They would, however, encourage you to engage in sex to your heart's content, even if the instrument is old, and even if it is no longer well-"supported". As I remember (it's been about 25 years (since I
*read the book*, Rich!) ), Dr. Comfort actually recommended that. :-PI still think a lot of this discussion comes down to whether electronics designers (who, after all, are being paid to create intellectual property) are just trying to skate around the necessity of paying for somebody else's intellectual property, which has admitted value. Otherwise, why would we be having this discussion at all?
I understand everything that's been said about this by others, and actually agree with a lot of it. I respect these opinions, and everyone here has good arguments. But I'm not going to change my opinion, because it's a matter of principle and the way I do business. My employer or customer is paying for his pleasures. Period. If it's copyrighted, the person who's paying will get a legal copy. There are better ways to save a few bucks. And if I buy a used and non-supported HP instrument (like the HP3456A), I'll spend $25 more for a legal manual, even though I could find a copy. That's one of the joys of being in business.
If the copyright laws need to be changed (and Frith knows they do), then let's change 'em.
Chris
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Try this source. I got some HP manuals from Ed Matsuda for a very reasonable price. His email address is edmatsuda earthlink.net.
[snip]I read in sci.electronics.design that "Watson A.Name - \"Watt Sun, the Dark Remover\"" wrote (in ) about 'Copyright on HP service manuals', on Sat, 23 Apr 2005:
Most manuals contain warnings about safety issues. Denying access to those warnings could be contrary to Health and Safety laws.
-- Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. There are two sides to every question, except 'What is a Moebius strip?' http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
Well, that doesn't help if the data on the disk itself gets corrupted. Then you get the all-too-familiar A: drive "Abort, Retry, Fail ?" error message and you're still SOL.
I've used CDRWIN to generate my 2353 byte raw images. This is important to me because things like equipment manuals which contain text can be kept heavily compressed, so if a single little error creeps in, it can affect large portions of the text.
Stepan
On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 09:32:23 -0700, Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, the Dark
No, no. That's the LIRPA, from that QST article "Power a-plenty - for pennies!" You just take the fat wire out of the back of your transmitter, and connect it to a skinny wire, and at the joint, all the electrons crowd together trying to get through the skinny wire, causing a dramatic increase in voltage, much like a traffic jam.
;-P Rich
Well, you can always read the raw data from the floppy and do data recovery on the image file by hand... This is where I think it's nice to have some error correction and interleave in the data being recovered. You certainly don't get that with FAT12, and especially not with compressed filesystems. Netapp has an iteresting product that is esentially a RAID5 but with two parity disks instead of just one. You have to loose two drives to loose the array.
Stepan
Ha, I *like* it. That's the sort of stuff that a lawyer could understand. Maybe they'd change their tune if they thought they might be liable for withholding safety information from users.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
That's called a stub. It's an impedance mismatch causing a standing wave. The skin effect renders the thin wire resistive, so it's presence is not relevant. This is a perfectly normal phenomenon, there is nothing silly about it.
Stepan
-- I though I read here that they had issued licenses, but I didn't check their website to make sure. Mea Culpa...
life of
On the other hand, providing fee manuals encourages folks who are RESPONSIBLE FOR making corporate PURCHASING decisions, to buy nice vintage HP equipment on eBay for hobby use. This is a great way to promote NEW EXPENSIVE HP product into the corporate environment. If folks end up purchasing Keithley for hobby use just because they can download the manuals, they might come to see that some of the Keithley stuff is quite nice.
Also, each and every time a lawyer sends out a cease and desist in the name of protecting his client's interests, he can bill for his service. I'll bet that depending on the arrangement, he can often do this on his own initiative.
Stepan
Data/IO did something like many years ago with all their vintage EPROM programmers. They sold/licensed the service/support for their legacy products to another company, but they did not get out of the business.
Stepan
On 22 Apr 2005 15:36:43 GMT, Daniel Haude put finger to keyboard and composed:
I'd go much further than that. I'd compel all vendors to provide service manuals, including circuit diagrams, for all their products, at some nominal charge in electronic format, either via the Net or on a CDROM. This would be a condition of doing business. In this way much of the equipment that is presently consigned to landfill because it is uneconomical to repair would still be in operation. This is a job for the useless tree-hugging whale-watching Greenies. It's about time they developed some testicular fortitude and pressed for some *real* legislative changes. I could care less about the environmental impact of plastic bags, or the "controlled" supply of drugs for youth, or how close I'm allowed to approach a cetacean, etc, etc, etc.
- Franc Zabkar
-- Please remove one 's' from my address when replying by email.
-- I disagree. If the instrument maker supplied an instruction manual with the instrument when it was first sold, then, as far as I'm concerned, he's under no obligation to provide further _free_ copies of that documentation. As a courtesy, it might be nice for them to do so, but why should they _have_ to?
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