For those of you who like reading little stories, here is one.
Lets see, where did my interest in Tektronix start? A friend of mine, Ken, called me up and asked me If I wanted to buy an oscilloscope at the same time as him. This was in 1986 or so and I was a teenager. I said, "Shure! How much?" he said he would buy one for about $150 and there was another for $200. I always wanted a scope, so lets do it!
It was basically an electronic test equipment scrap store. Equipment piled everywhere. The owner showed us the scopes but said he had to repair them first. That should have been a red flag! So we returned a few weeks later and bought the units. I got a 545A and my friend picked up a 541. Mine worked for 6 months and then poof, dead trace... it took maybe a year before I got around to finding the problem just by random checking. I was measuring resistors in circuit when I found a 150ohm reading open. So I bought a modern ceramic power resistor and replaced it. We have life! it worked again!
It was good for maybe a year or two then... no trace! augh. So I just bought a new 'scope, something realiable. After that my Tek scope went into dead storage. "oh I'll fix it someday, when I get the schematic."
I had been searching on the internet for information, now and then I would find a circuit or a page of a schematic. I would throw it into a folder on my computer. I eventually found someone selling about 6 manuals at a reasonable price. He did not have the actual manual for my scope but I thought it would be good enough. So I asked for the 541 and the plugins I had. Then thought, what the heck, and bought them all!
I thought I would sell the manuals I did not need. So I wrote a quick web site to list what I had, and started to read the Tektronix forum. Someone was looking for a manual I had, but that I wanted to keep. So I offered to scan the schematics, he thought it was a good idea, and I ended up scanning the entire book! Hence was born my service manual section. Through contacts and trading it grew and grew. I also wanted to have a place to go to look up the specs on scopes ie. bandwidth eg. 20MHz
So here is my site, which hopfully will keep on growing according to needs and usefullness. I am open to suggestions and corrections.
Just a note, I do not actually have all these scopes, it is a virtual musuem.