Whoah! I had no idea these things could produce hardcopy.

That one has a centronics parallel printer port on the back.

Exactly. It works with dot matrix printers.

I have a Tek oscilloscope from that same era that will do inkjet as well as saving TIFF and bitmap to floppy. And yes I am drooling ver that 571, I’ve wanted one for years.

I have a 577, yours is clearly a few leaps beyond this old beast! What’s the interface to the external screen? Composite?

It has no native external screen interface. But inside the device there is an additinal unused connector marked COMPVID. It provides the MDA video. It's an old monochromic video signal standart, so it required me to plug an extremely old monitor to it. It works on the same plincipal as the usuall composite signal but a modern composite monitor won't work with it.

My school still used these guys in 2019.

How is this RF related?

You do know transistors are used in RF amplifiers and people have to know the DCIV curves for design, right?

Yeah but a more "relevant-to-RF" aspect of that would be how the DC characteristics impact MAG, frequency response, NF, etc.

If you do device modeling you need DCIV information eventually to tie you in with all those RF parameters you mention. If you are a load line type designer this would be kinda your bread and butter. You could also skip all that and jump straight into measuring Spars, Noise parameters, etc… I’m in the second camp. I do measure DCIV every now and then …

What do you think transistors do?