Perhaps. But in my line of work, I find that a curve tracer is the most useful diagnostic tool when performing an autopsy on a piece of electronic harware.
Actually, as the American Heritage Magazine of Science and Invention reported several years ago, and this site confirms, there was an oscilloscope version of Ping Pong extant in 1958. No attempt, AFAIK, was made to market it, but apparently it was set up for lab visitors to play with:
By the way, this site and several others cite Ralph Baer, not Nolan Bushnell, as the father of Pong. I don’t know the truth, myself.
We used to have a lab scope card in our diagnostic computers, but when the units were upgraded, there were no lab scope cards that would work. So after much searching and testing we distributed one of these babies to each of our United States and Canadian dealers. I got to help buy about 500 O-scopes.
The really cool part about this scope is that it includes known good patterns for the tech to reference to.
Spacewar did not run on an oscilloscope, but on the big display CRT hooked up to the PDP-1 in MIT Building 26. I took an assembly language class on that machine, where the final project was to play the Game of Life on the scope. If it didn’t flicker, you got an A. I think I played Spacewar once.
Did Bushnell ever see SpaceWar, or did he just read about it? I also played Computer Space - and early version was put into the MIT Student Center, and our Logic Design class made a field trip across Mass. Ave to see it.
As for real scopes, I have nothing to add. My worst moment with them was trying to see a 150 MHz signal (fast in 1973) on a 100 MHz scope. The best signal I saw all summer was from coupling from the flourescent lights. I look at logic analyzer signals all the time, but others collect them.
Day before yesterday, another fellow wanted to detect vibration in a machine and I suggested a magnet, a hand-wound coil, and an oscilloscope.
My first Oscope experience was adjusting trimpots on 555 timers in a 7400 series circuit to get the right delay between steps in an automation sequence. We used Tektronix 535 scopes - big, heavy ones with tubes - and counted reticle divisions between the trigger on channel 1 and another line on channel 2.
I have a beautiful old CRT out of a DuMont oscilloscope. This thing has two electron guns and two sets of deflection plates (oscilloscope CRTs generally use electrostatic beam deflection rather than the electromagnetic deflection used in televisions, for some reason I never have heard). Thus it has two independent channels without chopping or alternating the sweeps. It can even do two XY displays - you could have duelling lissajous figures.
The site cited in my post claims the 1958 Ping Pong game didn’t influence anyone because so few people saw it. Bushnell and Baer came up with Pong without knowledge of the earlier work. To wit:
Here I might actually be wrong. I read my site as saying Bushnell invented it and Baer implemented it. I should have mentioned Baer regardless, however.
From my other site:
I honestly don’t know who to believe, you or the webpage. I’m dragging my cite into this to show I didn’t pull the idea out of my ass.
Why not use an accelerometer?
Simpler construction which results in lower cost and greater robustness, primarily. 'Scope tubes are long and slender compared to TV CRTs, so they can get away with using electrostatic deflection, since they don’t require the large angle of deflection required in a TV tube which electromagnetic coils can provide.
I seldom find reason to argue with Q.E.D. on things electronic, but this is such a case. While it might be possible to use coils if cost were no object, it would be a royal pain for practical, rather than economic reasons:
Magnetic deflection coils have fairly high inductance. In a raster scanned display, the horizontal scanning happens (in a fast computer display) at a few tens of
kiloHertz, and the vertical scan at a few tens of Hertz. At these frequencies, it is manageable to supply enough voltage to drive the inductive sweep coils, though during the horizontal “fly-back” (return from right to left edge of screen, usually) The HD coil generates a high voltage spike that is captured, fed through a transformer, and used to supply the ~25-50 kilovolt acceleration voltage. The horizontal sweep device must withstand this spike, and that device was still a tube well past the point where everything else in the sets (except the CRT itself) had been replaced with solid state devices.Later, the sweep transistors were one of the least reliable components in a display, as the flyback voltage was very near the bleeding edge of transistor devleopment.
In contrast to the raster display’s kiloHertz scan rate, a cheap oscilloscope needs to sweep the beam at several tens of megaHertz and a good one in the low hundreds. This would require extremely high voltage to force the current to rapidly change in inductive deflection coils…orders of magnitude more than a raster display. Even vacuum tubes can only handle a few KV of plate voltage. Electrostatic deflection plates, while somewhat capacitive, (which leads to higher drive current requirements) are much more manageable in this case.
As Q.E.D. says, the CRT tubes that use them are long necked, and this allows the plates to operate with lower voltage. Essentially, the length is used as an “electron beam lever” to exaggerate the swing of the signals.
Finally, it has not been mentioned that good analog scopes also had, in addition to X and Y, provisions for a Z input, which controlled brightness of the spot. Rarely used, but essential if vector graphics were on the table. The Z input can have MUCH more bandwidth than the X and Y, as no deflection devices (neither plates nor coils) are being driven. This fact is exploited in the fastest of all oscilloscope-like devices, the optoelectronic streak camera .
Wow! I didn’t understnad much fromt hese replies! I guess I’m cut out to stay in the mechanical world. 
Wow! I didn’t understand much from these replies! I guess I’m just cut out to stay in the mechanical world. 
Apparently so!
Sweet stuff. What I could never figure out was why a shop owner would spend a gazillion dollars on a machine, instead of enrolling all of his technicians in a few classes, at a fraction of the price.
Our shops do both.
Some tools are considered manditory to be able to repair our cars, and we send them out automatically and bill the dealers for them. This scope was one of those tools.
The dealers are also required to meet minimum training standards for the technicians in the shop.
Some dealers send their guys willingly, others um not so. But in the end the guys do get trained.
On this scope, I teach a two day class where it is no lecture all shop time looking at patterns, how to set up the scope, what you are looking at, and where to go next. This is one of the more fun classes for me to teach.