Look What I Saw at the Dump

 

New Ipswich Transfer Station


New Ipswich Transfer Station

We no longer have a dump in traditional sense. We have a transfer station. However I have fond memories of Scofield Town Dump picking with my dad on Saturday in Stamford, CT. Old habits don't fade away, so I still check out the metal pile in New Ipswich to see what treasures I might find. Imagine my surprise when I saw an Oscilloscope.

Dumont Oscilloscope

I wasn't just any run of of the mill oscilloscope, it was made by DuMont Laboratories. They were pioneers in television technology. They were famous for their Cathode Ray Tubes, which is the heart of an Oscilloscope.

What the hell is an Oscilloscope?

In my opinion an oscilloscope is the ultimate electronic test instrument. It can graph an electrical signal in X-Y coordinates and display it on a CRT screen. If you've ever watched Outer Limits or Ernie Kovacs, you've seen an oscilloscope display.

Usually the electrical signal is plotted against time but if two sinusoidal signal are plotted against each other, you can get some interesting "outer limits" type displays known as Lissajous curves. It also can act as an voltmeter displaying voltage as a straight line on a grid.

I was able to use some really nice Tektronix oscilloscopes in my years at Digital Equipment Corporation, so I consider myself a s fairly adept with understanding them.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

Checking Voltages

This is not a photo of an oscilloscope. I was checking the voltage levels of power supplies with a Fluke multimeter. Years before this photo was taken my first job was working on timing boards for the PDP 11/45 Microprocessor. I used a Tektronix oscilloscope to assure that I had a nice clean clock pulse from the board. If it had extra humps I would remove a transistor till I found a good one. It was a weird job but I had plenty of time with that scope.

Baby Toy

I don't even remember how or why this happened,  but I asked to take an Oscilloscope home. I wanted to show my young son what his dad did everyday. This probably happened in 1977. I set it up on the dining room table and let him twist all the knobs. I used the onboard square wave generator as a display. He seemed to enjoy it.

Square Wave


Square Wave

Final Thoughts

I actually considered bringing this thing home from the dump (I mean transfer station).  However I realized taking a photo was probably a better choice. I doubt that it worked and it would be just another item in my collection of clutter. I encourage everyone to look for Ernie Kovacs videos.






Location: New Ipswich, NH 03071, USA

Comments

  1. DougFebruary 15, 2022 at 8:02 PM

    John, I know what you are talking about. My time with Honeywell in the early 60 I had one of those and used it every day. I have a box of old transistors, caps, and resistors that i kept.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Poltrack BlogFebruary 16, 2022 at 5:04 PM

    I still have a bunch of diodes, transistors and J-K flipflop chips... why?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

National Housing Emergency, 1946-1947

Image
I was born shortly after the end of World War II. I was in the first wave of the baby boom  when a child was born in the United States every 7 seconds. Like many of my fellow boomers I will become a septuagenarian this year, There was a shortage of housing for all the returning veterans and their families which was addressed by President Truman ( Source URL ) An act of congress, May 22, 1946, declared a national housing emergency and clothed the Executive Branch of the government with special powers to deal with it. The special powers were to continue in existence until December 31, 1947, for it was believed that the acute shortage of housing could not be overcome before that date. Under the emergency program more housing was built during 1946 than in any peacetime year since 1928 but the new construction fell far short of meeting the accumulated demand. Veterans returning from the theatres of war were finding as much difficulty in obtaining suitable living quarters sixteen mon
Read more

The Samuel Tarbell-Ames House

Image
The Samuel Tarbell-Ames House is one of the homes located in the National Register of Historic Places, New Ipswich Center Village Historic District. Center village is bounded roughly by Turnpike Road, Porter Hill Road, Main Street, Route 123A, Preston Hill Road, Manley Road and King Road. This is the description of the #34 property in the National Register: This large residence was built by Samuel Tarbell Ames (1810-1897), probably around 1890, as he is listed as owner on the 1892 Map. He was a Boston businessman who summered in New Ipswich, presumably before he built this house, as his wife was Mary Hartwell Barr, a daughter of Dr. James Barr, who lived at #33 across Appleton Common, and a sister of George Lyman Barr and Caroline Frances Barr, and whose cousin Elizabeth Keyser, lived at #30. The house then passed to Samuel's son, James Barr Ames (1846-1910), who was an Assistant Professor and Dean of the Harvard Law School. He was esteemed for his teaching and writing on l
Read more