[time-nuts] HP 5360A History?

Pete Lancashire pete at petelancashire.com
Wed Apr 13 19:28:59 UTC 2016


As part of my oldies collection I've ended up with three of them. One
works, the other two are nixie and I think it has Beckman/Sperry's
but could be LED's. I got the 2nd and 3rd one them when I was offered a
keyboard for the cost of a 200/200 mile road trip.

It took a bit of work to get the first one to work, but I'm still amazed at
what it must of taken to design. The keyboard is in it self quite
complex. I forget the IC package count after you add the keyboard and TI
plugin. I've never powered up the other two.

There's a article somewhere that talks about how it came about and how it
did not get canceled. From a fuzzy memory HP was surprised
that even with a $10K price they sold, either Bill or Dave were advised to
cancel the project due to its growing cost and complexity but
decided to keep it going in that HP would learn about designing with logic.
I have an internal HP logic design class notebook and it looks
like the 5360A might have been the seed for the class.

I'll see if I can dig up the article/URL.

The only thing I don't have is an original cable to connect the keyboard.
Multi conductor small round cable is getting pretty hard to find now days.





On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 11:45 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist <
richard at karlquist.com> wrote:

> This product came out in the early '70's when I was working
> for Boeing.  The company bought several and they were
> very popular.  This was an amazing advance for the time,
> to be able to measure short term stability so easily.
> This was before HPIB, so you couldn't easily connect a
> counter to a computer.
> As far as reliability is concerned, at least the unit
> I used never had any problems.  Everyone loved it.
>
> Fast forward to 1979.  I get hired by the HP Santa
> Clara Division.  I didn't work in one of the frequency
> counter sections, but they were located right next to
> me and I interacted with them during donut time.  (This
> was during the time that HP famously served free
> donuts at coffee break time).
>
> To my shock, I found that everyone at HP hated the 5360.
> I guess the complexity was a resource hog.  It was
> developed at least 10 years before PC-CAD systems came
> to Santa Clara, so the schematic was hand drawn and
> the PC board layout was with mylar tape.  The boards
> were hand loaded and wave soldered.  I did a 100 IC
> board that way with 8 layers and the checking alone
> took a whole week.
>
> It seemed to be lumped with a hated logic analzyer
> that was derisively referred to as the "logic furnace".
>
> It might have been one of those "image" products that
> made Bill Hewlett look good but the division loses
> money on it.  The 5071 was one of those, although
> the division didn't actually lose money on it.
> They just made less than they ostensibly could have
> on their preferred products.
>
> Rick
>
>
> On 4/13/2016 9:38 AM, John Ackermann N8UR wrote:
>
>> I was browsing through the HP Journal archives and came across the May,
>> 1969 issue, dedicated to the new 5360A Computing Counter -- "An
>> Electronic Counter for the 1970s!"
>>
>> I don't recall hearing much about these in time-nuts lore.  I can guess
>> from the Journal articles that it was a beast to keep running and was
>> very expensive (500 ICs and a 10A 5V power supply).
>>
>> Is anyone here familiar with the story of this product?
>>
>> John
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