Now that it's Summer, and a lot of people are out on the road, here's a little travel tip.
If you happen to be in the Portland area on a Friday or Saturday, spare some time to visit VintageTek, a little outside of Portland proper in what's usually called (kinda sorta) Hillsdale but it's more or less Portland.
http://www.vintagetek.org/It's a volunteer-organized, volunteer-funded, volunteer-staffed museum dedicated to the early decades of Tektronix, an irrepressibly innovative company that introduced, developed, popularized and "ubiquitized" the oscilloscope as an essential piece of test and measurement equipment, and produced some of the most classic (and notable) examples of the same.
If you have time to chat with one of the docents there, you may, as did I, come away with the impression that Tek (as the Tektronix cognoscenti call it) seemed to have a knack for developing prescient products and abandoning them just as their introduction would have vaulted Tek into "world-beater" status.
Admission is free, donations are welcome, and a thorough visit is maybe an hour (or two, depending). If you ask nicely, you might get to go in the "back room" where they have some test/work benches and a lot of historic pieces waiting to be gone through.
If I lived nearer Portland, I'd volunteer there just to talk to some of the guys that routinely staff the back room...they've forgotten more about analog design than a lot of people know...way the hell more than I know, that's for sure.
Oh, and fair warning...the unbelievably sanitary point to point wiring and layout on the early models may just make you feel faint...it's that good. For example, Tek discovered that typical frp (fiber reinforced plastic) turret boards weren't stable enough for high-bandwidth scopes, so they developed and sourced (and patented) their own ceramic turret strips laden with silver solder...details like that will make you wish you'd brought a bucket of cold water with you...
