With regard to vintage test gear, one’s thoughts tend to those Nixie-adorned instruments of yore, or the boat-anchor oscilloscopes that came with their own carts just since there was no other method to move the things. however there were other looks for test gear back in the day, as this frequency counter with a readout utilizing moving-coil meters shows.

We have to admit to never seeing anything like [Charles Ouweland]’s Van Der Heem 9908 electronic counter before. The Netherlands-based company, which was later obtained by Philips, built this six-digit, 1-MHz counter sometime in the 1950s. The screen utilizes six separate edge-mounted panel meters numbered 0 with 9 to show the frequency of the incoming signal. The video below has a demo of what the instrument can do; we don’t understand if it was brought back at some point, however it still works as well as it’s really quite accurate. later in the video, he provides a tour of the insides, which is the genuine treat — the situation opens like a briefcase as well as contains over 20 separate PCBs with a lot of germanium transistors, all stitched together with point-to-point wiring.

We appreciate the look inside this unique piece of test devices history. It almost seems like something that would have been on the bench while this Apollo-era IO tester was being prototyped.