victory!

On a sunny day (Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:22:52 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

But does it play pacman?

It looks like it is doing a flight simulator very well. IIRC the 54000 series scopes of Agilent had asteroids as an easter egg.

The old ones played Tetris:

(And I mean really old... I remember playing Tetris on the 54600 in some undergraduate labs back in 1993...)

Surprising just how many "easter eggs" are in test equipment and other embedded devices:

The local Test equipment place has given up being a Rep for Tek. Reason? Price.

Cheers

Firebirds are nice stimulators. Agilent still making the best high frequency analyzers.

I wonder how many French engineers actually buy Agilent instead of LeCroy.

We also use LeCroy, but they only garner about 5% of our gear, at best.

The military buys Agilent only.

The HP Proliant blade servers are cool too. 16 full bore Xeon computers in a single 8U chassis.

HP also has some of the best packaging too.

Still, the best I've seen so far is how they package a 8" cube $50k Gyro. The 8" cube that comprises the gyro goes into an 11" cube box with an inch or more of soft foam all around the ESD bagged cube.

That box then goes into a 25" x 35" x 40" box that has some 40 6 inch foam cubes in it, all glued together and Velcro strips attached. A huge foam cube half goes in the box. The 11" Gyro box goes into an 11" cavity inside the cubes. The foam cube half goes over that, attaching in the center split between the foam cube halves by the Velcro strips. All the little foam cubes have about a half inch of separation between them. It looks like a castle cornice piece.

So, an 8" (max) cube of about 6 Lbs weight is cradled inside a huge

It could drop from a ten story rooftop and only experience a couple Gs sine bump inside.

General Electric knows how to package goods as well. That gyro exits the package with ZERO scratches. Not even so much as a washer impression where the mounting lugs (feet) splay out from the flat bottom.

I don't know who it was here that said they quit making VME cards, but they were wrong, cause they do that really good as well. Both VME and Compact PCI (which sucks as a standard). The dang Bottom Side components are rubbed by the previous slot hardware!

GE acquired several VME companies: Radstone, VMIC, SBS/Bit3, Condor, others. They often EOL older or low-volume products, or consolidate locations and lose people with institutional memory. This tends to annoy customers.

John

Some of those are top brands. Some were "acquired to obtain IP or other "noticed niceties". GE Fanuc makes some of the top notch stuff.

WERE top brands.

Some were "acquired to obtain IP or

It's not GE Fanuc any more. They have dissoloved the relationship with Fanuc.

John