In article , "Ian White, G3SEK"
writes:

Roy Lewallen wrote:
These days, the features are decided mainly by marketers and upper
level managers, few of whom ever spent any time actually using a scope.

An un-named source working for H-P/ Agilent totally agrees with that!

He also added:
"The founder of Tek invented the triggered timebase and offered it to
Hewlett-Packard. Bill and Dave saw the value but were committed to doing
other things for their near future and suggested he start his own firm,
giving him some advice along the way."

Well, I have no "un-named" sources, only the named ones. For two
interviews with Howard Vollum, co-founder of Tektronix, try:

http://www.infoage.org/oh-howard-vollum.html

Infoage is concentrating on the Signal Corps labs, most notably
Camp Evans, NJ (outside of Fort Monmouth) which became the
"Evans Laboratories," an adjunct of Fort Monmouth (along with
Coles and Squires labs outside of the Fort in the 1950s). Vollum
spent some service time at Camp Evans after overseas work on
radar in Great Britain. Vollum's interviews consist of one in 1955
and another in 1980.

There's some more at:

http://www.ohsu.edu/vollum/about.htm

There's also archive material from EE Times and several Tektronix
collector's web pages.

I don't find any reference to Hewlett-Packard, but more on the rivalry
with Allen B. DuMont and his oscilloscope company.

My own acquaintence is first with the 511AD model in 1954 while in
U.S. Army and becoming a supervisor on microwave radio relay
equipment. As far as I can recall, the sweep trigger of the 511 is
little more than a Schmitt Trigger circuit which was rather common
in pulse circuitry of the 50s. All of the first Tektronix scopes had
regulated power supplies which enabled the stability of the vertical
sweep to give true volts-per-graticule-marking information and for the
sweep rate to be calibrated with some precision. Whether in service
and maintenance or engineering design, the true information on the
trace is more important than whether or not the sweep trigger is
fancy (which it was, again, stable to use repeatedly thanks to the
regulated HV supplies). Add to that the "unblanking" of the CRT
while in sweep (blank screen during retrace) and the display is
quite natural and easy to use.

Having used a number of different instruments and scopes, I can't
agree with the "standard control arrangement" comments. Each
and every instrument has, to me, ALWAYS had some differences
which required attention to the bell and whistle control lay-outs.
This got worse by the 1970s when more and more function controls
were added to the front panels and the sizes of controls got smaller
and smaller. My fingers remained the same size...it got ridiculous
with the pointy little "keys" of the optional 7000 series (?) plug-in
for writing things on the CRT face...and the plug-in "spectrum
analyzer" modules from a company that Tektronix acquired.

Given the rather totally different function controls of today's DSOs,
it boils down to everyone needing to understand their instruments
FIRST before trying to use them. Ain't no such thing as "standard
control arrangements" when the controls don't apply to newer
functions.

Len Anderson
retired (from regular hours) electronic engineer person