Hi,

Come on, we all know how this will end... a raspberry-pi like processor running a virtual machine emulating the original processor (running the same firmware) and taking care of everything digital, and the analog asics doing what they do best.... HP48 style.
<<<

Daniel, that made me laugh :). Begs a question though - even if Agilent or whoever they are called today don't have the smart personnel or the market incentive to do a good job of bringing the whole thing up-to-date, they could add a better display, better connectivity, more stats, smaller packaging, more modern components etc and leave the clever analogue stuff alone. Sooner or later, someone is going to want to move the start of the art forward from the late 1980's.

Alan

In message <DB3PR05MB171EDDFB1237019D474778B95DA0@DB3PR05MB171.eurprd05.prod.ou
tlook.com>, Alan Ambrose writes:

In the HP3458A the cleverness is not just in the analogue stuff.
There is no way you could do something like that without stepping
over HP's software copyright.

You can probably get away with a FOSS project, provided you do it
in a way where people extract the necessary bits from their own
meter (using GPIB), but there is no way you can (legally) do it as
a commercial project.

That said, there are so many interesting things you could do with
that meter with improved software...

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

I would think that a lot of the patents would be running out soon as if
that would make any difference.

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:14 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp phk@phk.freebsd.dk
wrote:

--

John Phillips

In message CANEyv6aTuFHYa17nkx3F7zTWqerTiC1o=D=fCz8SXar3zGpEcQ@mail.gmail.com
, John Phillips writes:

I wrote "copyright", not "patent".

Thanks to Disney copyright never runs out as long as a lawyer cares.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

can you elaborate what copyright you think of. no one would make an exact copy of a PCB anyway, given many parts are obsolete and no smds used, and circuitries are generally not protected.

I would think the code may be copyrighted.

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 12:39 AM, acbern@gmx.de wrote:

--

John Phillips

In message <trinity-3551f905-92ff-4796-b985-ad35f7c4b0df-1431502794838@3capp-gm
x-bs49>, acbern@gmx.de writes:

You will need certain parts of the firmware, otherwise the analog
part will be of no use to you.

Not even the EU's "interop" rule wills save you in this case, as
you cut into the middle of a product.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

On 13/05/2015 03:14, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

My (half) joke was that someday Keysight will need to address the
unobtenium 68000 chips (and others) by emulating themselves all the
digital parts of the meter...

Daniel

They will buy several year worth of the chip when it is making its last
production run.

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 6:17 AM, Daniel Mendes dmendesf@gmail.com wrote:

--

John Phillips