On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), 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?

In the late 1960s i remember ICS, Daisy and Mentor systems that would do
board layout. Rather expensive though, about %50K for the base
workstation (often 2901 based) as much more for the software, another
chunk $70k for the photo plotter (Gerber compatible). All plus an
expensive person or two to drive it. And about $1k/month HW and SW
maintenance contracts to keep it running. They did 4-layer and 6-layer
boards or IC layouts with different and more expensive software.

My dad was a EE and got all the trade rags there were lots of ads.

(Around here, a lot of the people that you interview have worked for
Dolby. Turnover seems pretty high. They are like ILM, expecting people
to work for glory.)

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?