Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?

[coppice]

Tek hosed itself over before anyone else had a chance to assist.

Not really. The end of the cold war was a very difficult period for any maker of mostly defence industry instruments to survive. HP also went through a traumatic period, but bounced back better as other opportunities for exotic instruments, such as fibre communications, opened up.

[Wuerstchenhund]

lecroy's low end is kind of a joke though.

Indeed, everything below the WaveSurfer Series is a sad joke. I don't think they actually know how to handle the entry level market properly.

Fortunately there are lots of better low-end scope alternatives out there.

[macboy]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?

Danaher.

Sad that Fluke is next to suffer this fate. Right?

[Wim_L]

Some may say that the rise of the digital caused the demise but I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.   So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?

Because that's not quite true... Digital scopes from that era weren't particularly nice to use, and that's putting it mildly. They didn't sample fast either, they didn't have long memory, they needed a lot of recovery time between triggers. Current entry-level digital scopes still have some of these disadvantages, or just poor quality.

However, if you're prepared to spend the cost of, say, a 2467B on a recent DSO, you can get something that's almost as good at the things the 2467B was excellent at, and can also do a lot of things the 2467B couldn't do at all.

[LabSpokane]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?

Danaher.

Sad that Fluke is next to suffer this fate. Right?

I had to Wiki this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluke_Corporation), but it turns Danaher bought Fluke in 1998.  So, it seems that whatever is going to happen has already.

[Wuerstchenhund]

Mmmm...ok...but we worked directly with every major printer company besides Canon and as far as as print quality and speed at that time, Tek ruled. Of course inkets were much higher volume and killed everyone on price with the advent of the sub-$100 printer.

The thing is that it was Canon who actually was the technological leader in laser printing, not because of their own printers but because they developed very advanced printing engines and sold it to the majority of laser printer manufacturers (i.e. HP, QMS and many more).

Tek didn't even enter the printer business before (if I remember correctly) 1986 and came out with their original Phaser solid ink printer in 1989. At that time color laser printers didn't exist yet, and the inkjet printers of that time were pretty bad at image reproduction. Solid ink was quite good for reproducing images, and so lots of Phasers found their way into pre-press/proofing applications. However, solid ink just sucked at reproducing text, was very expensive (much more than laser printers and ink jets) and came with some other shortfalls (i.e. the requirement to keep ink temperatures high which meant high energy consumption), so Tek couldn't get into the much larger office printer market (and pre=press was too much of a niche to be sustainable as a sole business). To address this, Tek later added laser printers to their portfolio, but aside from one or two models which were good most of them couldn't really keep up with other printers using Canon engines.

We worked direct with Tek and what I saw in development was printers printers printers. T&M felt like a sideshow in that era. Just my perspective from the cheap seats.

The printer division was separate from the T&M part, so it's not surprising that they felt they were the important part than the "other" BU. That's pretty common in most divisions of large companies. I also wouldn't expect the printer division to have much insight into what's going on in the T&M division.

However, the reality is that printers were more or less loss-leaders, and that Tek couldn't really compete with companies like HP who flooded the market with cheap and reliable laser printers and later also with more advanced ink jets. That's why Tek's printer business was sold off in 1999, only about 13 years after they started it, while the T&M part lives on for almost 70 years. This shows pretty clear which part of Tek was bringing in the bacon.

[LabSpokane]

The printer division was separate from the T&M part, so it's not surprising that they felt they were the important part than the "other" BU. That's pretty common in most divisions of large companies. I also wouldn't expect the printer division to have much insight into what's going on in the T&M division.

Since we were a former Tek shop, we actually worked with both T&M and the printer division.  I'm sure we didn't see everything going on.  But the noise certainly came from the printer side.

It was notable that in the "Silicon Forest" of Portland and Vancouver during that era, virtually every other tech company was growing while Tek continued to shrink. Before Tek, Portland was basically a big logging/timber town with surrounding agriculture in the Willamette Valley and Vancouver was a shipyard.  Tek changed everything there.  It's sad to see them essentially gone. 

[zapta]

... I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.   So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?

What counts is not what people say but what people buy new. Is there would be a serious market for new  analog scopes somebody would fulfill it.

[c4757p]

I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.

Digital can be as good as analog if you spend as much on a digital scope as the original buyer of your used analog scope spent on it. Sure, used analogs (which were originally sold at a cost of exp(holyshit)) can be better than cheapo digitals, but that's not of much concern to a company that only makes new equipment and doesn't generally cater to hobbyists...

[Paul Moir]

Digital can be as good as analog if you spend as much on a digital scope as the original buyer of your used analog scope spent on it. ...

This is an extremely good point.  My 465 sold for $1825 when it was new.  Corrected for inflation that's about $8000 in today's money.  For that I could get a rather nice Agilent MSO which would be as nice to use, never mind that it is far more capable in every respect.

[free_electron]

I think danaher had not to do with the demise of the 26. Danaher came much later.

The reson these machines disapppeared is because we switched to digital scopes.
Get rig of that costly custom tube, plonk in a computer monitor or lcd. No need for lots of complicated analog stuff. Sample it as early in the chain as possible, dump it in memory, process it.

No need for power supplies that make 20 different voltages for all the differnt blocks including high voltages for deflection. +/- 12 and 5 is all you need.

When tek released ther first digital machines (tds500 series, not the 420 that was a sony product) the market shifted very quickly. Then agilent came along with the infiniium machines and basically stomped al over teks traditional hunting grounds. The idea of combining pc hardware with a samp,er board to make a machine was unheard of in tek land. Hp had both a pc and a tm division so they could do it.

Tek hurt .. Bad .. Divested abunch of its stuff and got borged... Game over.

[SeanB]

Making a CRT is easy. But to make a CRT that has 1GHz bandwidth, has less than 1% non linearity over the full brightness range, and which will give a similar brightness irrespective of the beam speed, and where you have amplifiers which have a 1GHz bandwidth and both DC stability and still can drive a 200pF load at 1GHz with 400Vpp and do so linearly is hard.

Using digital sampling to make use of a fast memory, and then simply using a much slower processor to average or something else, and then use a regular 50/60Hz monitor to display ( colour CRT, cheap off the shelf module, god life and no problems with drive to it) the signal, along with info on sweep and such and voltages, is a lot cheaper if you only have to have blistering fast and linear up to an ADC, and afterwards you use fast digital logic which is cheap to make and has no adjustments in production.

[Wuerstchenhund]

When tek released ther first digital machines (tds500 series, not the 420 that was a sony product) the market shifted very quickly. Then agilent came along with the infiniium machines and basically stomped al over teks traditional hunting grounds.

Don't forget LeCroy who put on a lot of pressure in the high end, not just on Tek. Even in the 90's the 9300 Series already topped out almost any scope made by Tek and HP (with the exception of MSOs, where HP had a head start).

The fact that the first Infiniium scopes running Win95 were shit didn't help HP/Agilent either.

[HighVoltage]

There was another player in the scope market in the mid 90th. It was Philips (Later Fluke) with the Combiscope that could switch by the push of a button from analog to digital. And these Combiscopes offered more in features and bandwidth and memory and clearness of the CRT than any other scope on the market. This must have hurt Tek and HP big time in those days.

For me, Tektronix never really recovered from that downfall.

The old Video of the story of Tektronix is great!

[Alex Eisenhut]

There was another player in the scope market in the mid 90th. It was Philips (Later Fluke) with the Combiscope that could switch by the push of a button from analog to digital. And these Combiscopes offered more in features and bandwidth and memory and clearness of the CRT than any other scope on the market. This must have hurt Tek and HP big time in those days.

For me, Tektronix never really recovered from that downfall.

The old Video of the story of Tektronix is great!

We had Kikusui in that timeframe.

[Wuerstchenhund]

There was another player in the scope market in the mid 90th. It was Philips (Later Fluke) with the Combiscope that could switch by the push of a button from analog to digital. And these Combiscopes offered more in features and bandwidth and memory and clearness of the CRT than any other scope on the market.

Certainly not. The top of the line of the Combiscopes was the PM3394B which offered a mere 200MHz and 200MSa/s with 32k sample memory, and this was at around 1999. At the same time there were scopes like the HP 54542C (500MHz 2GSa/s, 32kpts and color LCD) or the LeCroy 9384AL (1GHz 4GSa/s 8Mpts) or LC 684DXL (1.5GHz 8Gsa/s 16Mpts), all which were far more advanced than the simple Combiscopes. And then there were scopes like the HP 54752A which went to 50Ghz.

There were plenty of scopes that offered more features, bandwidth and memory than the Combiscopes.

This must have hurt Tek and HP big time in those days.

Again, not really. The Combiscopes were great scopes (we had several of them at that time and most engineers preferred them over Tek analog scopes) but at the end of the day they were not much better than an old analog scope. The screen was tiny and basic when the competition already had color LCDs and better GUIs, and the maths and measurement capabilities were pretty basic even back then.

These Combiscopes didn't hurt HP and Tek because when the CombiScopes were made analog scopes were already a dead end, and HP and Tek focused their efforts on the DSO which was clearly the way forward.

[dannyf]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?

Disruptive technology advances, from analog to digital, more specifically. Just like chemical to digital, or analog copiers to digital copiers killed Kodak, analog cell phones to digital cell phones killed Motorolla, the transition of analog to digital scopes has significantly lowered the hurdle for a new comer to get into the scope business and upset the paradigm.

The old players suddenly find out that 1) their low-end products cannot compete with the imports; and 2) they cannot keep up with the pace at which their digital competitors are updating their product lines.

The next wave is going to be faced primarily by the new comers, however, as new display technology and data processing technology get more integrated and scopes will become more and more of two loosely integrated parts: data acquisition, and data processing / display. Guys like NI went down that path a couple decades ago but they are well positioned now for the next decades.

[timb]

Ugh, a scope running LabVIEW. God help us all.

I'm a big fan of Tek, they've been very generous as a sponsor to me. That said, I use an MSO2024B as my day to day scope, it works OK, but it's not something I would have paid money for, especially not the MSRP. (My Tek DMM and function gen are awesome though!)

Hmmm, I wonder why the Danaher acquisition of Fluke and Keithly haven't affected them nearly as much?


Sent from my Tablet

[Howardlong]

Some may say that the rise of the digital caused the demise but I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.   So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?

Because that's not quite true... Digital scopes from that era weren't particularly nice to use, and that's putting it mildly. They didn't sample fast either, they didn't have long memory, they needed a lot of recovery time between triggers. Current entry-level digital scopes still have some of these advantages, or just poor quality.

However, if you're prepared to spend the cost of, say, a 2467B on a recent DSO, you can get something that's almost as good at the things the 2467B was excellent at, and can also do a lot of things the 2467B couldn't do at all.

That's a pretty fair appraisal IMHO. As an example, given the choice between a 2467B and a basic ten year old TDS 2024B 2Gs/s 200MHz real time DSO I'd choose the TDS 2024B. Having single shot storage even with the crappy 2.5k memory that the TDS 2024B offers is probably the single most valuable feature, overriding the superior bandwidth capabilites of the 2467B.

Having said that, the immediacy at which you can control an analogue scope through its plethora of knobs and switches makes them an absolute pleasure to use, in comparison to the modern DSO with many functions hidden away in a multitude of menus.

[T3sl4co1l]

It was notable that in the "Silicon Forest" of Portland and Vancouver during that era, virtually every other tech company was growing while Tek continued to shrink. Before Tek, Portland was basically a big logging/timber town with surrounding agriculture in the Willamette Valley and Vancouver was a shipyard.  Tek changed everything there.  It's sad to see them essentially gone.

It's funny because whenever I see one of their old scopes advertised as e.g. "portable, technician, maintenance, logging", I think... why would you need a scope with your chainsaw?

Tim

[T3sl4co1l]

Making a CRT is easy. But to make a CRT that has 1GHz bandwidth, has less than 1% non linearity over the full brightness range, and which will give a similar brightness irrespective of the beam speed, and where you have amplifiers which have a 1GHz bandwidth and both DC stability and still can drive a 200pF load at 1GHz with 400Vpp and do so linearly is hard.

Nah, they never had it that hard.  Even in the toob days (no shortage of deflection voltage there), they moved to distributed deflection -- it's just so much better.  And more sensitivity means less voltage, means less power needed and no need for matching between a row of tubes (high impedance outputs) and the transmission line.  Practically just drive the thing with a cathode follower, and you're there!

Probably the big crusty electrostatic picture tubes needed voltages like that, but scope tubes have always been in the 200Vpp range max.  Which is 100Vpp per plate, so you only need a 150-250V supply to do a good job of it.

Combined with distributed deflection and the deflection-enhancing shield mesh, I think they got down to something like 20Vpp in the 475, and less in the faster and special purpose units.  All made with normal (30-60V?) transistors, hybrids and ASICs.

Since scopes long since moved away from high vertical deflection voltages, the only remaining application for high voltages at high bandwidths -- were actually high resolution CRTs, because the video bandwidth is upwards of 100MHz (e.g., >163MHz pixel clock for 1600 x 1200 x 85Hz refresh), and the cathodes must be driven with about 50-100Vpp.  Late model CRTs used monolithic chips; possibly some of the best discrete transistors ever made were Sanyo parts, used in the early and mid model Trinitrons (and other high res CRTs), a typical example being 1GHz fT, 100-160Vceo and 200mA Ic (e.g., 2SC3995 I think?).

Today, such transistors are all but unheard of.  A shame, because they're still handy for niche applications.

There are RF parts available for voltages like that, but it's usually because you get more power at higher voltages.  There are some industrial 13.56MHz (and such) applications where a bus over 100V is desirable, so there are some parts made for those sorts of applications.  There's some interest in SiC and GaN for faster power switching applications as well (pushing 1 or 2 MHz, nothing crazy), but it's still very early.

Tim

[Richard Crowley]

It was notable that in the "Silicon Forest" of Portland and Vancouver during that era, virtually every other tech company was growing while Tek continued to shrink. Before Tek, Portland was basically a big logging/timber town with surrounding agriculture in the Willamette Valley and Vancouver was a shipyard.  Tek changed everything there.  It's sad to see them essentially gone.

OTOH Intel has effectively replaced Tek as not only the largest employer in the state (with roughly equivalent # of workers), but Oregon is the largest Intel site on the planet.  All of the microprocessor processes were developed here, and every Intel CPU since the 386 saw "first silicon" here in our development fabs in Aloha and now in Hillsboro, Oregon.

[LabSpokane]

It's funny because whenever I see one of their old scopes advertised as e.g. "portable, technician, maintenance, logging", I think... why would you need a scope with your chainsaw?

Tim

Because you bought a fancy, new Husqvarna saw and need to probe the uC.

The old Tek had a great corporate culture. I think it was a magical place to work while it lasted.

[Wuerstchenhund]

Oregon is the largest Intel site on the planet.  All of the microprocessor processes were developed here, and every Intel CPU since the 386 saw "first silicon" here in our development fabs in Aloha and now in Hillsboro, Oregon.

I don't think that's true. For example, the original Pentium-M (Banias) saw "first silicon" in intel's Israel R&D fab in Haifa where the processor was also developed. The same is true for the mobile Core 2 (Merom) and Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge.

What has been developed in Oregon however is the architecture that was about to kill intel in the mobile/desktop/server CPU market for good: Netburst. The Israeli engineers essentially saved intel at that time from the Netburst disaster and laid the foundation for subsequent processor series (Core, Core 2, Core i) which brought intel back to success.

The truth is that without the R&D fabs in Israel there's a very good chance that intel would have become irrelevant in the general purpose CPU space.

[EEVblog]

That's a pretty fair appraisal IMHO. As an example, given the choice between a 2467B and a basic ten year old TDS 2024B 2Gs/s 200MHz real time DSO I'd choose the TDS 2024B. Having single shot storage even with the crappy 2.5k memory that the TDS 2024B offers is probably the single most valuable feature, overriding the superior bandwidth capabilites of the 2467B.

I'd go further than that and say I'd rather have a TDS220 than a 2465/7 if that's the only scope I could have for day to day use. That's saying something, because I love analog scopes.