What Oscilloscopes Want

[email to Matt G.]

Feed Me Seymour

I don't have access to a lab any more but it should be possible to get into the hardware lab in Freescale if you ask the right person. My overall take on the o'scope is that it was the most general purpose tool for a very long time and then evolved to do what digital electronics wanted - a digital representation of multiple signals over time. The ability to capture multiple digitized signals was the first inflection point. Then it was a small step to logic analyzers that could 'see' bus protocols and capture edges on complex conditions across all the signals based on improved memory and processing power. What technology wants is an improved capability to look as as much state information over the longest intervals so that's what o'scopes wanted to do. And they got their wish while becoming a continuous number of instantiations of hardware and software. The o'scopes built integrated chips that make o'scopes better at what they wanted.

To quote Charles D.
"If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of instrumentation, technical tools vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each kind of instrument, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for market share, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all instantiated artifacts of technology to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each technical artifact's own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to the tool user, man. But if variations useful to any technical artifact do occur, assuredly individual tools thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for product life; and from the strong principle of inheritance of specific technical solutions in hardware and software, they will tend to produce divergent forms similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. Natural selection, on the principle of qualities being inherited at corresponding ages, can modify the IP, improved feature set, or new models, as easily as the earlier form."