Great test equipment designs

We have a few of the older ones.

I kind of like the analog meter.

They have a bias input, so you can do stuff like C-V curves.

Which I'm about to do with the MiniCircuits SAV-551 ephemt.

Worse. Highlighting lack of nouse and understanding!

I believe and presume it wasn't a secret, beyond that I don't know.

My second year maths exam contained the rubric "full marks may be obtained for answers to about six questions".

A maths student that saw our course notes (hand copied from OHPs) was horrified at the extent of the syllabus.

I bought my HP45 in my senior year. I was making $2.25/hr, 20 hours a week, working for the EE department as a technician at the time. I still have it but it's too flaky to use. The only calculator I liked better was the 10C. My first one grew legs decades ago. I bought one on Ebay a couple of years back. The first (and I think only) app I bought for my smart phones was a 10C look alike, so I always have one with me.

The 35S is as bad of a retro redux as the 2002 Ford Thunderbird. The only thing it had in common with the 35 was the two digits.

The dean's office threatened some nonsense like that but the EE department revolted. The counter argument was that college is expensive - did they ban slide rules twenty years before? Get over it.

I had a prof who designed his exams so that he could do them in an hour. The average was usually around 50, with the class high of 70. He had one transfer student, who got a 70something on the first exam, bitch to the dean of the engineering college that his tests were too hard (they were curved). On the second exam, he got a perfect paper. The prof marked one point off for penmanship ("no one gets a perfect exam in my class"). The kid lost it.

We had to buy a sliderule, but were not allowed to use it for any test or homework.

We had to buy a sliderule and needed it for homework and exams.

Dan

Hmm reminds me a bit of the qualifying exam(s) we had to take to get into the PhD program. Two days/ ~eight hours per day. You had to work out something like six problems a day.. and would probably make the cut if you got ~1/2 of those correct. Brutal! (I've forgotten almost all of it and would fail miserably today.)

George H.

What wealth! My first paying job was summer work designing nuclear instrumentetion for the physics department at the University of New Orleans. I was still in high school so they faked my enrollment to be able to pay me; they made me student number 20,000. I got 85 cents per hour.

It was good experience: microwave spectroscopy, high voltage pulsing, lock-ins, radiation counters, electronics for Mossbauer spectroscopy. Lots of serious test equipment. Interesting introduction to the culture of Physics.

I took one electrical machinery course where the test averages were

1. I got 40s and 50s, because I understood electricity already, which was an A.

I actually learned a lot in that course, about AC and motors and transformers. I don't think the other kids learned much.

Irony: the instructor's name was Weber.

How would they know about the homework?

Slideruler gives a rounded answer, Human calculation gives an explicit answer.

That's easily fixed.

We had an afternoon EE lab that everyone hated. After 5 minutes, the instructor would leave. A few minutes later, some us would leave too. At the end of the semister, we had to turn in all the lab reports, so we pulled an all-nighter and faked them. We knew the math, so we got good at sloppy slide-rule sliding to make graphs with nice data point scatters. They looked great. We got A's, and the guys who stayed and actually did the labs didn't.

I discovered, first day, that the shared lab B+ supply had 50 volts of p-p ripple. So the boy scouts got very different amplifier frequency response curves from the ones we faked.

That was my senior year, with three-four years experience. Minimum wage was $2.00/hr. I started my freshman year at $1.40/hr but they had to give me a raise after two weeks because minimum wage was $1.60.

I was working as a tech for the EE department, so got to work with some really nice test equipment (HP loved to give us piles of equipment) and I got to know all the profs really well (most were family friends anyway). It looked great on my resume, too.

Even though I was paying my way through college, I wasn't there for the money.

Yup. I have a couple of the analogue ones too, a 72A and a 72C. They have voltage outputs, so you can hang a DMM on them when necessary.

They're brilliant for doing photodiode measurements. There's an $8 Excelitas diode, 1-mm diameter, with less than 30 ps p-p propagation delay difference across the active area. That's amazing. The C-V curve revealed that there's a highly-doped buried layer, sort of like an APD structure. (The second derivative of the C(V) curve gives you the doping density.)

I need to get a bunch of those too, once my current crunch is past. Let's compare notes.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My third-year classical mechanics prof let us bring our notes and nitty-gritty sheets into exams, but no books. He said, "No books, it would be unfair to rich people. They'd still be flipping through their books when the poor guy had solved the problem."

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's simply absurd.