Look What I Saw at the Dump

 

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.

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)

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.

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.