Re: Difference: Digital Oscilloscope vs Digital Storage Oscilloscope?

Age would be most of the difference.  When the entire world was analog and 
today's digital world was wishful thinking storage scopes used to be very 
expensive and difficult things to come by.  With the advent of digital 
scopes the world changed.  Digital scopes are ideal for saving data in a 
format that can be read back, just like a computer.  The creators (and 
marketing departments) of such digital scopes wanted to make people aware 
of this capability; hence the name "Digital Storage Oscilloscope".  This 
name also goes back to the day and age when memory and disk drives were 
more expensive items and only some digital scopes would have the memory 
required to save a waveform or a disk drive to record the data in a non-
volatile way.  

These days most digital scopes have disk drives and adequate memory to 
collect as many waveforms as you'll need to do your analysis and the 
'storage' term has been dropped.  Only in your student labs will you find 
digital scopes that do not have disk drives.  The newest HP Infinium 
scopes use an AMD K5 microprocessor, run Windows 95, and lets you attach a 
keyboard and mouse or print through a network.

The bottom line, however, is that both digital oscilloscopes take samples 
of their input data and display it on a pixelated monitor however a 
storage scope will have more memory and a disk drive to save copies of 
your waveforms.