HP 150A Service manual

The 10 Mcs General Purpose Scope

Even if it had, like the 130A the honor of being on the first color pages in the Hewlett-Packard Journal, the 150A didn't have the same success. Built to take on Tektronix in the mainstream high performance market 10 Mcs bandwith, the 150A offered no improvement in speed or cost over the initial Tektronix 511 family introduced nearly a decade earlier.
Main Specifications are:

SWEEP: 0.02 µsec/cm to 15 sec/cm in 24 calibrated ranges
SENSITIVITY: 5 mv/cm to 50 V/cm with Model 151A amplifier
PASS BAND: DC to 10 mc - Rise time less than 0.035 µsec
COUPLING: AC or DC - 1 megohm shunted with 40 µµf
AMPLITUDE CALIBRATOR: 18 cal voltages 0.2 mV to 100 V
CATHODE RAY TUBE: 5AMP - 5000 Volts acceleration
INTENSITY MODULATION: Terminals on rear panel
PRICE: 150A Oscilloscope $1000.00 - 151A Amplifier $100.00
For the first time, a non innovatory instrument had been produced at HP. And the worst was the very bad start of the HP vs Tektronix challenge. Much information can be found on the subject in the John Minck narrative. HP would have to wait the beginning of the 60's and the coming of sampling technology to produce competitive oscilloscopes, thanks to step recovery and hot carrier diodes technology internally invented and developed by the HPA component division. Competition between HP and Tektronix would be hard during the following 20 years, with frequent advantages to Tek. Leadership would come back to HP in the mid 1980s, when oscilloscopes would have to talk with computers and became System Scopes. At that time HP took advantage of its experience in computers, and most of all, of the power of its HP-IB (Interface Bus), making oscilloscopes and hundreds of other instruments, all talking to each other and manipulating data with computers.