As a grad student in 1986, I was a TA for freshman physics lab, and an obligatory rite of passage was the notorious "oscilloscope lab." The other TA, and the pr

As a grad student in 1986, I was a TA for freshman physics lab, and an obligatory rite of passage was the notorious "oscilloscope lab." The other TA, and the professor, were both theoreticians. I was the only grad student with any electronics experience, because it was my hobby. Still is. We had a large lab room full of about 30 scopes and signal generators, most of which had flaky controls. No explanation was given beforehand (that any of the students read, at least), and there wasn't time to explain things like how or why the scope shows a stable display of a time-varying waveform. And because of the behavior of the controls, no explanation was believable. It was a debacle. As for phosphor-like digital displays, I wonder how many patents Tektronix has on the concept. Many of them are probably expired by now.