The ***Ronnie Raygun*** administration was a big booster shot for the semiconductor industry, especially mil/aero divisions. A lot of new "modern" equipment was purchased in the 1982-on timeframe to replace the old, manually intensive crap. Anything that was not programmable via rs232 or ieee488 was usually relegated to the lab, dumpster or a dark storage room and forgotten. HP came out with really cool multicolor pen 2D plotters (for electronic test) about that time - ieee488 bus, finally we could capture waveforms, scale, superimpose and plot them out on paper (we had to set up oscilloscope with a Polaroid camera before that). B/W pictures only because color was really expensive. Lol!