I remember years ago getting a demo Tektronix oscilloscope dropped off to our workshop and we powered it up and it said ‘Starting Windows’ both my colleague and I looked at each other and sighed and I just pulled the power lead and put it back in the box.

That thing has some pretty smooth running applications for something running windows 2k. Also it has a weirdly modern look to it in my opinion, with the dark background and the yellow and blue design. Very nice bit of kit.

Awesome bit of tech. And as you say, so useful.

You could virtualise the Omitek? Put the analyser card on a PCI-e to PCI riser inside a server, then run Win2k inside a VM with PCI pass-through.

It being Win2K doesn't surprise me too much. That OS tended to be more on machines that are intended to be managed over network than XP. I am however fascinated by the high refresh rate and data sampling rate of the scopes. But I guess that's what the whole PCI card gives you. Hardware accelerated scopes and video throughput. All the OS had to do was to handle the GUI and render whatever the card gives it. So I guess the stability of win2K trumped thenewer XP option. As an amateur color enthusiast, seeing these scopes feels right at home. I mean. You can usually do most video color correction stuff with just a RGB Waveform parade and Vectorscope once you learn what they show you. But still. It's fun to see all the other monitoring stuff. Looking in the Blackmagic catalog they sell a 2 channel 4K SDI monitoring rackmount thing with a couple of screens for about $800. Sure, it maxes out at 4K and not 1080i. But it is the closest thing I found there that would be sort of what this win2K machine does. So getting this HD-SDI machine for free is quite a nice gift for sure. :D

Given the hardware its running that is impressively smooth and responsive something i might struggle with today! i mean artificial phosphor calculations alone is very annoying

Win2k would be used because it might of been attached to a corporate network

would it be possible that you how you go about making bootable copies of HDD like in this instance to SSD, i find it very hard and not many usfull information on the net how to successfully do it. Can you maybe do something simple and quick how to go about that kind of thing