RE: Fixing an HP59313A

DAB — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:14:13 GMT

I remember the old HPIB well.

Powerful in concept, but a pain in the ass to program.

RE: Fixing an HP59313A

shabaz — Mon, 05 May 2025 17:25:51 GMT

Nice-looking hardware! Definitely fun exploring what's inside old equipment. A lot of the vintage stuff had so much logic ICs the boards are huge. I also liked this example of fitting in the boards (image source) to still allow for troubleshooting:

There's one on ebay currently, but too expensive (I already at a high level know how this thing works, although it would have been fun to explore since there's a ton to learn from it). It's a speech encryption device that plays with the signal in ways such as flipping the frequency spectrum and chopping the speech samples into segments and swapping the order, and so on.