nic 1170 nicolet instrument corporation four ch digital oscilloscope 1978

[@IMSAIGuy]

what a beast! 12 bits!

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Really surprised at how little there is in there, but then we're so used to lots of clever features in oscilloscopes - this probably had very simple functionality and low bandwidth

[@trevorhaddox6884]

The construction is on par with TTL mini-computers of the era, totally normal for the time. Boards had to be hand traced and they only had two layers, whenever they needed dense wiring it was wirewrap. Telecom equipment of the era was also all wirewrap.

[@TeslaTales59]

Fab engineering! Curios Marc would indeed love it also. Great exploration sir.

[@picoj44]

Loving these teardowns, to rival the best!

[@Dieseleux]

Nice instrument! I have Nicolet 4094 with dual floppy in external box and full leds plugin, is magic rainbow to see at power on..... Is very fun to use.

[@nickhuwar7920]

Not prototyping. It’s wire wrap. Things where made that was from the factory. Look at the back plane on a pdp 11

[@absurdengineering]

I’m thoroughly impressed by the layout. It’s beautiful! The “random” right angle track runs were to give room to chips that were supposed to be there, or in case more chips were envisioned later. The layout also surely had revisions on the Mylar. We see the final photo output. The Mylar original probably looked like a battlefield. I did way less complex layouts using tape and scalpel on Mylar when I was a kid. They looked so clean on the finished PCB but the Mylar had many alterations I knew about since I made them :) There probably is still a box with all the tape rolls of various widths somewhere in a storage room in my old house. But I was definitely an early adopter of CAD for layout. In the early 80s it would be printed at 2x or 3x scale using a dot matrix printer, in bold (2- or 3-pass) and then photo-reduced. There were some rather simple DOS-based layout editors available that operated on a fixed grid and used a collection of bitmaps to represent various board features. “Drawing” the layout you’d select the bitmap from a palette and then “draw” it on the grid. It gave very nice results in spite of how crude it was. I figured out the binary file format for it and made a netlist generator so that I could print it out and manually verify that the layout was OK. The file was basically a rectangular array of bytes and each byte represented the bitmap/symbol index. For “tracing out” the connections the netlister would follow the trails of symbols. It was super crude but it worked. All in GWBASIC. And wondrously slow :)

[@zaprodk]

Impressive boat anchor!

[@Dustycircuit]

Those tiny LED-displays are so cute.

[@tafsirnahian669]

What a beauty!!

[@KeanM]

Not surprising that those old tantalums went pop. Tantalum caps do have a nice habit of bursting into flame at the slightest bit of stress, and these are OLD. It is a pity you were not recording video when it happened, but great to hear the amusing comments from your wife.

[@TeardownOZ2CPU]

ha ha thanks.. yes she have seen a few instruments melt down, it always happens when camera is not running, and i play arround with the unit a few hrs between takes..

[@KeanM]

I recall as a kid that my dad brought home a Data General mini computer. It still worked when decommissioned, but during the move into our house some of the wire wrapping on the backplane got ripped out :( It was fun to pull it all apart anyway.

[@gerardzi7930]

Il doit être assez rare maintenant de trouver cet oscilloscope en bon état de fonctionnement !

[@raymundhofmann7661]

What a beautiful oxsilloscope!

[@KeritechElectronics]

Thing of beauty, joy for ever! Impressive construction. I wonder what Dave Jones would say. Posting a link in the TEA (Test Equipment Anonymous) thread on the EEVBlog forum is surely a good idea, maybe you'll find people who are familiar with this scope. Dodgy-bodgy backplane with wire wrap connections doesn't surprise me. It's reconfigurable and customizable to some extent, if you know what goes where. That's how they did computers way back when... Replace all the little shitty electrolytics. If one blew, others are sus too. And just look at those teeny tiny bubble LED displays for cursors... that's just way too cute.

[@TeardownOZ2CPU]

that is a good idea, i just created a post at eevblog

[@hinz1]

Awesome machine, where you need like an EE or math degree, to work with ;-)

[@OneBiOzZ]

I doubt its a prototype, its probably a built to order device, i would be shocked if they sold over 10 of them the cost of this would have been extreme and the usecases would have been niche

[@RensePosthumus]

Very nice video (i forgot the time so I had to run for work). Beautifully apparatus. Could you elaborate on the blue IC's are they special?

[@TeardownOZ2CPU]

they are simpy resistors, for termination, or pull up or pull down, a good way to make things smaller

[@geirendre]

4:55 "Skal beskyttes ved jording " thats Norwegian and translates to "Must be protected when grounded "