Oscilloscope Basics: History Mode

Figure 1: Initial setup of WaveSurfer 3000 with a
2-MHz pulse waveform fed into Channel 1

Back in the day, one of the biggest deficiencies of early digital oscilloscopes was their lack of memory depth. A memory of 500 or 1000 points was about as good as it got, and this didn't provide much in the way of detailed waveform capture. Today's instruments are very different animals; for example, Teledyne LeCroy's recently introduced WaveSurfer 3000 oscilloscopes offer up to 10 Mpoints of memory per channel.