Foreword

Mr. Oscilloscope Product Design Wrangler -- John Campbell

Working for Hewlett Packard marketing in the Instrumentation World of the 1960-80s had a competitive landscape that acknowledged HP as the Number 1 supplier in highest performance and reliability and breakthrough measurement technologies. HP, in most of our product lines, microwave products for instance, did not have to worry about who was #1 in the marketplace. From the beginning, that was not the status of oscilloscopes, Number 1 was Tektronix, with a solid position earned from their formation at the end of WWII. Tek was the target for HP's outpost in Colorado Springs. Their product ingenuity would be tested against Tektronix, the 1000 pound scope gorilla in the room.

The reason that Dave Packard ordered us into the scope business was that our independent Sales Representatives of the late 1950s sold both HP and Tektronix. But then Tek decided to establish their own sales force, thereby depriving those Reps of a crucial product line. The new competition between HP and Tek scopes played out over the next 30 years, and has been described and analyzed on this website with HPMemoirs by Cort van Rensselaer, Bill Terry, Chuck House and Bob DeVries. Each of those authors told of different aspects of the scope wars with Tek, and of how to live their corporate lives after the move to Colorado Springs as the perennial #2. (I can remember the Avis vs Hertz ad, "We're #2 so we try harder.")

HP's oscilloscope team rightly started into the scope wars with several products which attacked an opening in Tek's offerings, low frequency scopes. In 1956-58, the HP 120 (200 kHz) and 130 Series (300 kHz), with superior features like pleasing CRT displays and simpler circuitry, yielding a lower price. This was the industrial era of major breakout of the electronics industry, consumer, communications, military orders filled research labs, and the culture of the time had accepted "general purpose" lab oscilloscopes to be Tek 10 MHz models. Even if you were just doing audio measurements. But HP's attempt to take on the main line of 10 MHz scopes with our Model 150, was not destined to win any design prizes, nor much share of market.

But the competition was ON. For the next 4 decades, HP did become a serious competitor in the oscilloscope landscape. As the digital world of semiconductors began its ascendency in the 1970s, microcircuits attained performance in pulse rates and transition times such that systems designers across the globe were frustrated with analysis tools. And along came HP with a superb new technology, HP 185 sampling oscilloscopes. Leveraging on HP's other skills in diode diagnostics, the Frank Boff discovery of the abrupt-recovery diode enabled sampling times in the sub-nanosecond region and creation of 1000 MHz equivalent display of repetitive pulses. A gigantic leap, to awaiting computer and communications industry.

We in other instrument divisions which dominated markets could understand our divisional funding with R&D and marketing budgets considerably higher in scopes than the HP norm. And time proved that was a good decision of Bill and Dave, as the scope division began a long line of successes. Newer workhorse 10 MHz scopes came in compact HP 1740 style, and garnered big military contracts, with a waterproof yellow cabinet. An important early-on decision to establish our own CRT fabrication facility yielded superior performance, with other clever innovations like the internal graticule, something that leapfrogged Tek. With HP's massive technology array across divisions, and the dramatic breakout of digital and computers and communications and logic, they were on their way.

John's comprehensive anthology compiles one new product after another, each exploiting the talents of HP in other areas, such as digital functionality. He was obviously a product designer with general practitioner skills. As he describes new R&D projects, I was first dazzled with the code names, Panther, etc, Jackal, which may say something about the personality of those intrepid product teams, which were allowed to coin their own code names. One I recall from Microwave Div was Scrumpy---with no known connection to anything other than it was a low-cost generator, and if you google it, you find it is a harsh apple cider.

With his creativity showing in the many different new products, John also excelled in solving knotty problems like the noise of ventilation fans, normally an afterthought. He invented the "tackle box" feature for storing scope accessories, probes and whatnot. Any of you readers who has used scopes has cussed out the standard plastic pouch attached to the top surface, which looks ugly and interferes with stacking any other needed object on top.

Instrumentation moved fairly quickly to digital foundations, and created a demand for digital pulse generators and logic analyzers and communication format error rate analyzers among other specialized gear. All of those functionalities fit easily within the scope product lines, and became tasks of John to apply his analytical skills. Product design is as simple as making front panel control knobs and switches more convenient to handle, to the layout of all the dozens of buttons and displays themselves. As you scroll through the dozens of tasks that John solved, you will be astounded with his clever solutions. Especially since much of that kind of study affects the HP or Agilent or Keysight BRAND look.

At the end, I think you will agree that John nailed all of his product designs and HP style results. Along with all the other ancillary tasks not tied to any one product. And he adds memories of extensive travel to the HP production centers in Malaysia, as well as suppliers. That is the real value of a clever Product Designer. We are reminded that another HPMemoir on this website has also revealed a sequence of similar jobs, and that is Bob DeVries, of the 1960s. Interestingly, Bob also cut his technical teeth in the USAF, with duty in the radar electronics shop of Castle AFB, maintaining Strategic Air Command B-52s.

This personal HPMemoir again demonstrates the delegation of design tasks to engineers who have to solve the immediate problem, but also respect the HP brand and style.

John Minck