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posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 02 2019, @07:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-take-yourself-too-damn-seriously dept.

https://vintagetek.org/tektronix-schematic-cartoons/:

Tektronix schematic draftsman redrew the engineers schematic for release in the instrument manuals. They must have had some jokers in the group because small cartoons found their way into some of the manuals and schematics. The schematic cartoons are subtle humor likely focused on the names the engineers gave some of the circuits or components. While we think we have found most of the cartoons, every now and then one of our restoration engineers shouts out from his bench that he found another. Send us a note if you find one that we have not. We are still looking for whatever instrument has this "Pilot Light".

[...] Cartoons also found their way into other documents including the 1956 Employee Handbook and ServiceScope. Arnold Rantala was a draftsman and drew a number of early cartoons. The April 1965 ServiceScope featuring Spectrum Analyzers has a number of nice cartoons including some on this block diagram.

Back in the day, I remember hearing you should get your signal generators from Hewlett Packard and your displays and analyzers from Tektronix. Good to see that Tek folk had a sense of humor, too!

For their VAX systems, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) went against the norm of providing a time-of-day clock (TOD clock) and had, instead, a time-of-year clock (TOY clock).

In this day and age of political correctness, what other companies take a light-hearted look at things and reveal it to the world? SpaceX comes to mind with the names of their drone ships on which they land their boosters (e.g. "Of Course I Still Love You"). Any others?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @09:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @09:09AM (#875049)

    I remember these: https://www.sm5cbw.se/tubes/humor.htm [sm5cbw.se]
    About a decade ago I was dealing with Macintosh IIfx schematics reverse engineered from mainboard, there was a "twist" of data lines for expander. Near the "twist", AFAIR between bus and some expanding buffers, there was a cute drawing of an octopus with entangled tentacles. Anyone had these schematics too?
    Well, they has a sense of humor too.