It’s a regular occurrence that we run across old objects which just aren’t useful anymore, at least not as they were originally intended. Sometimes they’re junk. Sometimes they work well enough, and it’s nice to have a backup around, just in case. And sometimes?
Sometimes it’s old enough that it’s got a little bit of cool going on. Like this 1960 Tektronix 503 oscilloscope. It shouts SPACE AGE! from all angles. (Our good friend Matt likened the round display screen to a porthole into a sea of electrons. Of course!)
It might not work anymore – probably depends on whether the capacitors are still in good shape – but we haven’t tried. It’s not like we’re going to use this in place of any of the other, more modern, higher-frequency, smaller-footprint ‘scopes we’ve got in numerous labs. This stays around because it looks amazing.
Even the insides are fantastic! Big honkin’ resistors, induction coils, capacitors, all widely spaced for effective heat dissipation. You can trace how each knob turns and switches circuit components in each of those cylindrical arrays. As a kid, this is probably the mental image of what it looks like inside a giant robot. Giant robots are the best robots.
On the other side, we can check out all of the vacuum tubes that made this sucker hum. Plus a big ol’ transformer and a wonderfully stylish CRT for the display. Vacuum tubes don’t show up many places anymore, having been replaced with miniaturized circuit components, but we still have use for them in special cases. (Photomultiplier tubes in our wave-particle duality lab, for example.) Despite their rarity, you can’t deny that they look awesome.
We even have a pair of manuals. A pair. Does that mean there were once a set of 503s around? Could we possibly stumble across another, gathering dust beneath a workbench in a dark corner someplace?
After all, that’s where this one popped up, undisturbed for decades. Never know what you’ll uncover.
