Buyer's Guide

What ZDNet UK's editors want for Christmas

ZDNet UK ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Dec 2004

For many years, I was the proud owner -- and occasional user -- of a rather ancient Cossor oscilloscope. Ex-MOD, it had all the knobs and buttons a chap could desire, and it made as many cool green squiggly lines as you'd ever wish to see outside a 1970s sci-fi flick. For the technically minded, it was a dual-beam 20MHz device: you could just about debug a Z80 computer with it and fix most things that went wrong with a telly or a radio. I did all those things with it, but mostly I just grokked having the thing around as a badge of proper geekhood.

Unfortunately, the 'scope got lost in peculiar circumstances -- along with my Geiger counter, ex-Admiralty B40 receiver, PDP-8A minicomputer (with real core store, for shame) and much else. So, dear Santa, what I want this Christmas is an Agilent Infiniium DSO80000 Series oscilloscope.

This little beauty is the state of the art in electronic measuring systems. Four channels and twenty gigasamples a second back up a stonking 13GHz bandwidth -- so there's nothing going on in even the fastest computer that can escape the attention of its probes. And oh, the technology inside. High technology doesn't begin to cover it: the combination of hybrid construction, silicon germanium, gallium arsenide, BiCMOS, on-structure Faraday shields and other mixed analogue and digital technologies make the front end of this scope one of the most uncompromisingly advanced statements of technical excellence on the planet.

It doesn't hurt that such a rich coalescence of different ideas results in circuitry that looks strikingly different -- a strange and intriguing mixture of abstract layouts, bursts of symmetry and exotic structure. Rich gold filigree microstrip forms almost Mayan patterns on top of crisp white ceramic substrates, while fluidly sculptured isolation shields outline symmetric blocks of occult functionality.

This is technology at the precise point it shades into Arthur C Clarke's third law and becomes indistinguishable from magic -- and like all good magic, it looks the part. But like all good science, it has the added extra that it works. And being an Agilent device -- in other words, Hewlett Packard's tradition of engineering excellence at its best -- it carries on working. No obsidian knives or nervous virgins required. It is a thundering shame that the newly revamped Museum of Modern Art in New York doesn't have an example of this device.

There are downsides. From the outside, it looks much the same as other test equipment -- with the exception that some bright spark has decided on a pastel colour scheme to differentiate the four input channels. Lemon yellow, olive and dusky blue -- yeah, just about. But pink? A pink knob on a device this uncompromisingly macho is like Schwarzenegger in suspenders: it should never, ever be allowed. And then there's the cost -- we're looking somewhere north of $120,000. But Santa doesn't count the pennies, does he? Anyway, if he wants me to redesign that global sleigh positioning system to use the new European satellites, he'd better deliver -- or someone portly will be walking back home to the North Pole next year. I trust I've made myself clear.

Agilent

Price
from $120,000