Idle thoughts, irony...

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Bruce Lane wrote: I've found that there are very definite categories of electronic stuff that tend to get "outdated" at different rates. PCs (meaning Intel-based Windoze boxes) are at one end of the range, with the average motherboard design being produced for at most five months, and RF & analog test equipment being at the other end of the range, with products often lasting for 20-25 years or more. The conversations I have with non-electronics people who walk into my RF lab are often very funny. They'll see the purchase & calibration date stickers on something like my Tektronix 492 spectrum analyzer or the HP 3325A synthesized function generator and see that they're in excess of ten years old. I can tell who the PC people are by their statements like "Wow! Why are you using that old thing? Surely there's something newer! How can it possibly still work?!" when (as any electronics buffs here know full well) that argument is completely bogus. Take that current tracer, for example. There's absolutely *nothing* in the functionality of that unit that would be improved in the least by any advances in electronic technology in the past 15 years...much less in the past one year. While, at the other end of the range, a new PC motherboard needs to be brought to market every few months to keep up with the processor-clock-itis that drives the PC world. The conversations I have with non-electronics people who walk into my RF lab are often very funny. They'll see the purchase & calibration date stickers on something like my Tektronix 492 spectrum analyzer or the HP 3325A synthesized function generator and see that they're in excess of ten years old. I can tell who the PC people are by their statements like "Wow! Why are you using that old thing? Surely there's something newer! How can it possibly still work?!" when (as any electronics buffs here know full well) that argument is completely bogus. This is the main reason why the PCs and other stuff at that end of the range tend to have zero resale value, while stuff at the other end hold their prices in the used market for many years. A government surplus place that I frequent is where I see this in action...they get stuff in by the truckload, ranging recent as Pentium boxes that, by their stickers, are two years old, go straight to the scrap pile...while the nearly 25-year-old HP 141T spectrum analyzers get gingerly carried inside and wiped down, ready to be sold for in excess of a thousand dollars. -Dave McGuire