The closest I got to tubes was I had an old stereo receiver that had tubes in it. I think I still have it someplace. I have this belief that most of the younger folks don't really understand computers because they never had to program one with 1's and 0's like we did. I'd like to have an o-scope again. They come in handy.
Definitely correct on the younger folks not understanding computers properly by not knowing how they really work at the low levels. I cut my teeth on Z80 assembly back in the day because my father used that glorious micro a lot in his work. I moved into 8031/8051 assembly and wrote all the code by hand in a text editor running on a Morrow Designs MD-11 CP/M machine belonging to my dad. That taught me a lot about being memory efficient, keeping it simple and ultimately that good code came from blood, sweat and tears. I feel like I've gone soft since then as I program in C, C++ and C# these days. I know better but it's all too easy to just write it quick rather than optimized. I program Arduino/ESP-32 projects too just to have the tight memory constraints again and keep me honest.
I've been looking at modern scopes lately. I have an older Tektronix 455 analog with on-screen overlays, but it is getting old and failing on me. I can't find a full service manual for that beast so I don't think I will be able to bring it back to life. New digital scopes are weird. They offer a lot of nice features, but they are overly complicated and I would probably just use one in a basic sense and rely on my skills rather than new fangled features. They are priced way better than scopes used to be and the one I am looking at as the top contender is only around $350 for a four channel 50 MHz bandwidth jobber that can be easily hacked to 100 MHz. If you're interested, this is the Rigol DS1054Z and it is widely available. I haven't pulled the trigger on it (no pun intended) yet because I still feel like the Tek 455 is salvageable if I dig around hard enough. I'm probably just deluding myself on it and would probably need a scope anyway just to troubleshoot it properly. Lol!
I cut my teeth on 8080's and 6800's. We used to have this Tektronixs development machine that we'd write the code on in a text editor on it and then it would check the code and we could burn it onto a EPROM later EEPROM's. Later on I'd write code on a CP/M box as well trying to remember the text editor we used for everything. Anyway then you'd stream the code for the EPROM to the programmer over a serial cable. That was easier than using that Tektronix system. Plus we could write code for a wider array of CPU's, anything we could get an assembler for. We too also started using Z80's and 8051 Single chip computers. Damn, I haven't thought about any of this in a really long time. LOL
Good info on the scope, thanks.
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