Archaeologists are people who study “human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains.” Over the past few decades, a new type of archaeologist has appeared. They’re devoted to the analysis and preservation of electronic test and measurement equipment in a manner similar to old car aficionados who lovingly restore and modify old automobiles. Among the technology archaeologists I’ve met and call my friends are Marc Verdeil, who publishes fascinating repair and restoration videos on YouTube as “Curiousmarc,” Ken Shirriff, who reverse engineers old ICs and writes about them in his blog, and Marc Mislanghe, who created the incredible tribute to Hewlett-Packard’s long product history on his website, the “HP Memory Project,” which is based on his extensive collection of HP gear. Verdeil is a former Bell Labs researcher, Intel Fellow, and a serial entrepreneur who founded several Silicon Valley tech startups. Mislanghe was a support and sales engineer for HP who created his HP tribute site in his retirement. He passed away suddenly in 2014.

I’ve just become familiar with another technology archaeologist who’s been on the scene for a while and who has produced a 1200-page opus titled “The Great Hewlett-Packard.” This new archaeologist is Giovanni (Gianni) Becattini, who was born in Florence, Italy in 1951. He became an electronics engineer and a serial entrepreneur. Becattini began writing about electronics early in his life. At the age of sixteen he began collaborating with CQ Elettronica, an Italian magazine devoted to electronics. In 1973 he designed the Child 8 microcomputer, which was based on Fairchild Semiconductor’s somewhat obscure F8 microprocessor, He chose that processor after finding a kit of components for it. Becattini subsequently founded Italy’s first personal computer company, Micropi, which evolved into General Processor. He later switched to building computers based on the Zilog Z80 and called that machine the Child Z. In 1998 he founded AEP Ticketing Solutions, which develops electronic ticketing solutions for public transport.

Becattini is now retired and devotes himself to restoring old equipment, particularly test and measurement instruments, and he has written several books about his countless restorations. These books include “Tektronix: Epic Oscilloscopes,” “Tektronix: The 7000 Series,” “Tektronix Restoration Guide,” “Military Surplus Equipment,” and “Adventures with Instruments.” As you can see, Becattini has a thing for Tektronix oscilloscopes, but he’s now produced “The Great Hewlett-Packard,” which contains a wealth of information about many of HP’s test and measurement instruments going back to the mid-20^th century. Today, there are two companies bearing HP’s name, and neither company makes test and measurement equipment. That legacy was passed down to Agilent in 1999 and then passed along to Keysight Technologies in 2014.

The best way for me to describe “The Great Hewlett-Packard” is to say that this is a lovingly illustrated coffee-table book devoted to an esoteric collection of test and measurement instruments that have been restored and reverse engineered. The book contains hundreds of photographs taken during Becattini’s restoration work. The photographs portray the restored instruments and the boards and components inside the instruments. You can feel Becattini’s love for these instruments from an admonition that appears in a sidebar on page 716 of the book:

“Don’t Waste These Masterpieces!

“These instruments are precious witnesses of our history. Never try to modify them; keep them clean and in their original state. Try to repair/restore them with the respect due to a work of art. Never cannibalize them to get spare parts and sell them for more (unless I need them…). In short: love them!”

You can also tell that Becattini has a sense of humor because he portrays himself throughout the book as an AI-generated, anthropomorphic white duck – something of a hybrid of Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, and Howard the Duck – and because Becattini’s faithful assistant, a gray tabby cat, also appears throughout the book.

Becattini’s assistant is his faithful cat, Barattolo, seen here working on the repair of an HP 8160A programmable pulse generator. Image credit: Gianni Becattini

The book is divided into several large sections, each devoted to a type of instrument: Voltmeters, Signal Sources, Oscilloscopes, Counters, Spectrum Analyzers, Calculators, Computers, and HPIB. In addition to his discussions about various HP gear in these categories, Becattini also includes discussions of similar products from other vendors. Because he’s lived in Italy all his life, his selection is of instruments from France, Italy, and Tektronix. I must say that I found these discussions and the accompanying photographs equally fascinating.

Although I worked for HP and had plenty of HP gear on my workbench, I never worked with or owned most of the gear discussed in Becattini’s book, so most of the book’s information was quite new to me. I enjoyed reading Becattini’s analyses of the inner workings of these instruments. Some of his analysis stems from his interpretations of articles that appeared in the “Hewlett-Packard Journal,” which HP published from 1949 through 1998, shortly before HP’s breakup. Early on, HP understood that the HP Journal was an excellent marketing tool and served to promote HP’s leadership in the electronics arena. We are fortunate that this encyclopedic history of HP’s innovations has been preserved and is available to technology historians and archaeologists like Becattini.

It’s impossible to cover all of the products Becattini discusses in his book, but I do want to comment on some of his discussions about the products with which I’m familiar. The first such discussion is an excellent explanation of the optoelectronic chopper amplifier in the HP 410C analog multimeter, which HP introduced in 1963. I never had or used this meter, but I was fascinated by the tube-based chopper amplifier in the instrument, which was designed to handle dc or very slowly varying ac signal voltages with auto-zeroing circuitry.

HP’s engineers implemented the chopper amplifier with a switching block consisting of photoconductors and neon bulbs. The neon bulbs are interconnected to form a relaxation oscillator, and their light alternately illuminates the photoconductors to switch between the signal being measured and ground. The circuit nulls any drift that the amplifier might have, so the HP 410C had no zeroing potentiometer on its front panel as did many VTVMs and FET VOMs of the day. I was always fascinated by the aluminum-block construction of the photoelectric switching assembly and enjoyed reading Becattini’s explanation of the circuit. HP retired the chopper amplifier in the 410C voltmeter in 1981 and replaced it with an IC op amp. The company continued to sell the upgraded 410C meter until 1986, giving the instrument a 23-year product life. Neither of the two DMMs that I had when I worked at HP, the HP 3490 or the more famous HP 3458, appear in Becattini’s book. Perhaps he’ll get one of those to restore for a future volume.

One of the HP instruments that I did have on my bench back in the late 1970s was an HP 180C analog triggered-sweep oscilloscope. I don’t have much good to say about this scope. In fact, I called it the “fat-beam” scope because I could never get it to focus as nicely nor trigger as well as a Tektronix scope. I expected to see a scathing critique of the HP 180 scope from Becattini because he’s clearly a Tektronix kind of guy based on the titles of his books. However, I was disappointed. Becattini wrote:

“It’s like discovering that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. For two years I wrote hundreds of pages about the wonders of the Tektronix 7000 series as if it were the discovery of perpetual motion, praising its exclusive solutions and the genius of those who created them. I had looked with ignorant contempt at some images of the HP 180 series oscilloscopes. What copycats, I thought. Typical “me too, me too” situation in the wake of a highly successful product.

“Then, in May 2024, I go to the usual Marzaglia market where I can get a 180A and a 181A for few euros. I take them home and start restoring them. But look how shamelessly they copied, I think. They really look like 7603s… As always, I start writing a few pages about them, delving into their history, which I hadn’t paid much attention to previously. And then the shocking discovery: HP introduced them in 1966!

“All of my most deeply held beliefs came crashing down and, after running to correct a lot of the nonsense I had written, I had to resort to a course of psychotherapy.”

Becattini resorts to psychotherapy after analyzing and restoring an HP 180 triggered-sweep oscilloscope. Image credit Gianni Becattini

That’s as good a sample of his writing from the book as I’m likely to find, so if you’re interested technological archaeology with an emphasis on HP instrumentation, you can pick up “The Great Hewlett-Packard: The HP Memory Project Edition” here as a free set of three PDFs, and you’ll find links to downloadable versions Becattini’s other books here.

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