On 9/17/2014 2:25 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips. They made them with
scale factors so you could more easily see what you were doing, 2x and
4x that I recall. You set your design rules by picking the tape width
and the pad diameter. If you were a little tight and wanted to shave a
little off a pad... you shaved a little off a pad. lol

I didn't do layout then, but I've seen the artwork. Xacto knives are
your friends even if it is just for picking up the tracks and pads and
placing them.

I don't think CAD systems were used much even for layout until around
the time the PC hit the scene. I guess the big companies had them...
with "huge" 20" CRTs and light pens most likely. Don't know for sure.

--

Rick