> It'd be fun to have a book of tricks from this era.

Though it isn't a book, the Hewlett-Packard Journal is a gold mine for this type of content: https://web.archive.org/web/20120526151653/http://www.hpl.hp...

E.g. An 8-Gigasample-per-Second, 8-Bit Data Acquisition System for a Sampling Digital Oscilloscope (October 1993): https://web.archive.org/web/20120526151653/http://www.hpl.hp...