Found this on the net about hp serial numbers. Just a post from someone in 2003. Don't know if it is true or not, but WTH. The one I ordered did not have picks of the serial number anyway.
So, is this the way the serial numbers are encoded?
"The serial is: USA 2228A11076
Take the first two digits and at it to 1960 = 1982 (year). The next two digits represent the week in the year = 28. The letter indicates where it was made. A = America, B=Brazil, S=Singapore, etc. The remaining digits tell you that it was the 11,076th manufactured "
Pretty much. I've learned a bit more regarding the encoding - the three or four digit prefix represents the year and week of the engineering revision that the instrument is built to. The leading two (or one, in the case of three digit prefixes) digits are added to 1960 to determine the year, and the last two represent the week.
The letter is country of manufacture - A for USA, U for UK, G for Germany and J for Japan, for instance.
The digits after the country code are the serial number of the unit.
Its actual manufacture date may be well after what is indicated by the prefix if it was a design that wasn't updated. I have an 8644B with a prefix of 3546 which indicates a late 1995 rev; it's actually marked as an Agilent unit and based on component date codes looks to be late 2000ish production. FWIW,
-Pat