Comment by elwin

I sympathize with the horrible equipment. While getting a physics degree, I had a lab where we measured resistivity. My team was the last to succeed in getting numerical data from the 20-year-old oscilloscope via floppy disk. The students scheduled after us had to take a digital photograph of the oscilloscope screen and reconstruct the data from that.

Broken equipment is not confined to undergraduate classes. A few terms later, I had to use the digital photograph method to get data from a spectrometer in a research lab. If my analysis had succeeded, we would likely have published, and the professor would have had a chance at tenure, all on the strength of data obtained by counting pixels.