HP and Tektronix Message #1 Posted by Ellis Easley on 22 Apr 2003, 9:20 a.m.
As is mentioned here occasionally, HP oscilloscopes were never as good as Tektronix and the weak point of HP scopes was the trigger (or to put it another way, Tektronix scopes always had a better trigger). I have been browsing through "The HP Way" by David Packard and I ran into a page about oscilloscopes. First, he talks about an engineer named Howard Vollum who Bill Hewlett met while he was in the Army during WW2, who was interested in building a new type of oscilloscope: "He wanted to design one with a triggered sweep, a concept from radar technology." He talked with Packard but rather than join HP he wanted to start his own company, which HP helped him do by introducing him to their sales representatives. The company he started was Tektronix.
Packard goes on to say that HP should have started building scopes earlier but didn't introduce their first one until 1956 - the model 150, which is the earlier of the two scopes of mine which have the original round HP logo. Packard says it wasn't very reliable. When HP organized their R&D into four divisions in 1957, one of them was just for oscilloscopes. But Packard says they never caught up with Tektronix until they "developed an oscilloscope system managed by a computer some years later" - the digital sampling scope?
I want to add something from an older thread:
Michael F. Coyle wrote re:HP Logo:
"Well, way back when, the HP logo was in "portrait mode" rather than "landscape mode" like it is now.
Somewhere over at work we have a 200C floating around with the original (?) logo.
(Another OT logo question: when did Tektronix switch from the round to the rectangular CRT in their logo? I'm guessing 1970-ish.)
- Michael "
Then I responded:
A question about the different HP logos came up a while ago and I thumbed through "The HP Way" but the only picture of a logo in that book is from a 1967 trade show booth decorated with the portrait mode logo. At one point the HP logo was neither portrait nor landscape mode, it was just a circle not quite enclosing the lower case "hp", the top of the "h" and the bottom of the "p" traveled a good way past the circle. You can see this logo on the HP200A oscillator in the HP Virtual Museum:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/earlyinstruments/0002/0002front.html
At one point HP spun off a company called Dynac to build systems integrated from HP products. The name Dynac was chosen to fit the upside-down HP logo:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/earlyinstruments/0006/0006front.html
The portrait mode logo encloses the circle in a tall rectangle and truncates the excursions of the letters at the perimeter of the circle with the region below the circle solid color and the region above the circle scored horizontally. It gives me the impression of "earth and sky". I have two HP oscilloscopes from the late 50's and early 60's. Both pieces of equipment have only the round logo and the manual for the older scope has it too but the manual for the newer scope has the portrait mode logo on the covers and title page. As it happens, the older scope has a plain round CRT and the newer one has a post-deflection acceleration CRT which blocks the beam from reaching the phosphor at the very top and bottom of the round face, sort of like the portrait mode logo cuts off the tails of the letters. Later oscilloscopes with PDA have rectangular faces. I have always thought that the landscape mode HP logo reflects the change from round to rectangular CRT's on oscilloscopes. For a while the landscape mode logo was blue on the right and black on the left, later it was blue on both sides with the letters still black, and now both sides and the letters are all in a convenient color already in use on the panel. Did HP feel black and blue for awhile? It would seem to have been HP's heyday (70's-80's) but if the logo represents an oscilloscope, HP probably did feel beat up by Tektronix!
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