[time-nuts] Re: HP 10811A unusual appearance

[Lux, Jim]

On 8/23/22 7:18 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist via time-nuts wrote:
> The original 10811's used so-called "sculptured" flex circuits.
> That was a disaster and then they changed to conventional ones.
> I don't know if any of the sculptured ones shipped.  If they
> did, it might explain why the boards look different.  It
> could be that no sculptured versions officially shipped, but
> you have a prototype that escaped from the mother ship
> without a serial number. 


At JPL, we dispose of all kinds of "e-waste" in large bins. So if you 
had a bunch of lab breadboards that have long outlived their usefulness 
then they go in the bin.  There are people who buy the bins (I think 
they're auctioned off) and sort through them, or just grind them up and 
extract the metals. The vast majority of whats in there is stuff like 
old cables that have cracking insulation, boxes of 30 year old parts of 
dubious quality and provenance. I could easily see HP working 
similarly.   For what it's worth, at JPL, it's against the rules for 
employees to dumpster dive - There's apparently a govt originated policy 
on this, to reduce the possibility of the equivalent of a restaurant 
worker throwing away a $400 whole fish, to be rescued later by a 
confederate.

I used to have tubes and trays of some IC or component in my desk or on 
a shelf in a cabinet in a lab, where we needed half a dozen or so, and 
we bought 10-20 to have spares.  We never did work out a good way to 
keep track of "lab spares for breadboarding", and periodically (every 10 
years or so), they'd go on a "let's clean out the cabinets" movement, 
and we'd purge the stuff that a)was clearly degraded; b)we had way too 
many of (we had cabinets full of weird shaped brackets to mount 
something in 19" racks, but nobody could remember what it was they were 
for); c) components that were supplied as part of an experimental 
contract (vendor goes and makes 30 pieces of something, we test 3, and 
they don't work, so the box just goes on the shelf).  As people retire, 
the knowledge of "what is that iridited box from a company that doesn't 
exist any more?" goes away, and stuff winds up in e-waste.  Or the data 
sheets were purged in an earlier activity, so you know what it is, but 
no idea how to use it.

OTOH, there are regular calls at amateur organizations like San 
Bernardino Microwave Society to give a new home to a storage container 
full of 30+ year old stuff accumulated over a life time.  So in that 
case, the mystery box just gets a new home, until it gets readopted 
again. Typically, the stuff moves when a particular storage reaches it's 
physical limit of capacity (or, "you need to get rid of that shed, 
because we're building a pool" kind of events).