Subtle, important differences..
IMhO the fact that I can 'steal' a working instrument (incidental that it is also so well made as to qualify as 'art' too) Too-cheaply -- indicates something important about the present society and its near-future, especially as regards "technical education" and 'our' expectations for the future of that.
Such an instrument could not be produced today except at exorbitant cost - the CRT fabs themselves have been scrapped.
(It would be like Shrub's decision to recreate Plutonium fabs - but only sorta like that: we already have 1000 tons and access to Russia's. Another thread on Sanity, that one.)
The digital replacements, while generating all sorts of automatic data for repetitive waveforms - still cannot 'see' certain random events, nor ever - in real-time. That's what I mean by Too- (== 'artificially') cheap. This is a loss in *capability*, in the physics sense. And no - there are no foreign equivalents either, though there are some also-ran analogue scopes maybe still in production. You'd have to be an EE to fully appreciate what a "scope" means as ... "your eyes".
The price of digital toys OTOH simply reflects the easy mass production of SiO2 derivatives and the cheapness, after early profits amortize development costs. No personal Artisan skill is required in assembly (which is fortunate, one might suppose - as we lose those).
(But the loss of widespread 'film' cameras will be a loss of an Art; that of communicating something about an instant in time, using many human sensibilities. Digital will always be capable of 'documenting an object's appearance' for one's files. Different.)
Ashton
