On 9/17/2014 10:46 PM, josephkk wrote:
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).

Are you sure about your timeframe? Was the 2901 even around in the late
60's?

Wikipedia - "Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits (ICs) created in
1975 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)."

I think CAD for anyone but the really large companies didn't happen
until nearly 1980 give or take a couple of years. We had a couple of
68000 based workstations in 1985 and I remember they made a 2901
software compatible version which ran twice as fast, which still wasn't
much. I started some sort of run and I recall it had to run overnight.
Then some idiot came in and pressed a key which kills your process.
What a stupid key to have on a keyboard.

--

Rick