Semi-OT: Question about HP 130C O-scope

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net>
Date: Fri Feb 26 18:58:49 1999

At 05:21 PM 2/26/99 -0500, Chris wrote:
>Upon the date 12:40 PM 2/26/99 -0800, Sellam Ismail said something like:
>>
>>Does anybody know when Hewlett-Packard made the Model 130C oscilloscope?
>>Its tube based. The serial number is 503-03353.
>
>Sometime just after the 3rd week of 1965.
>
>Rule for deciphering HP SN's in the above format as tought to me by a
>couple of different HP service engineers and other written sources:
>
>Take the numbers preceding the hyphen and add 6000. Result gives the first
>two digits as the year

   Add 6000? that would mean it was (will be?) built in the year 6005! No,
add 1960 to the first two digits of a four digit prefix or add to the first
digit of a three digit prefix. That means it was built in 1965.

and the second pair is (usually) the week of
>production. Numbers after the hyphen are the serialized number.
>1834A-xxxxxx is some unit built around 34th week of 1978, for example.

   That's ALLMOST true. Actually the dates on most (all?) items are offset
8 weeks to allow for shipping and distribution and so the customer will
think they're getting a BRAND NEW machine. Therefore 1834 would mean it
was really built in the 26th week (34-8) of 1978 (1960+16)

Note
>the "A". Can't recall when, but the nation of manufacture is depicted by
>that alpha character. A is USA, J is Japan for example.

  S=Singapore, K and Q = United Kingdom, M=Malaysia, I think C is Canada.

  BTW I've noticed that some limited production items all have the same
prefix. It seems that HP orders labels in batchs and uses them until
they're gone no matter what the actual date. For example I have a number
of HP-IL accoustic MODEMS, ALL of them have the same prefix. I've talked to
others that have the same MODEM and ALL of them have the same date.

  Joe
Received on Fri Feb 26 1999 - 18:58:49 GMT